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\ T ITKD STATES OF AMERICA.' 



? 



PROSE IDYLLS, 



NEW AND OLD. 



REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY, 



CANON UK WISTMINMT.i:. 



JTonboir : 

MAC MILL AN AND CO. 

1873. 



[ The Right of Translation and Reproduction is reserved.] 






*v? 



I ■ 

> STl'.P.RT HILL. 



CONTENTS. 



j. 

'A charm of birds . . . . 



II. 

OHALK-STREAM STUDIES 27 



THE FENS 



IV. 

MY WINTER-GARDEN . 133 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA .17 



VI. 

NORTH DEVON 22-' 



PROSE IDYLLS, 
i. 

'A CHATttf OF BIEDS; 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



'A CHARM OF BIRDS.' 1 

Is it merely a fancy that we English, the educated 
people among us at least, are losing that love for 
spring which among our old forefathers rose almost 
to worship ? That the perpetual miracle of the bud- 
ding leaves and the returning song-birds awakes no 
longer in us the astonishment which it awoke yearly 
among the dwellers in the old world, when the sun 
was a god who was sick to death each winter, and 
returned in spring to life and health, and glory; 
when the death of Adonis, at the autumnal equinox, 
was wept over by the Syrian women, and the death of 
Baldur, in the colder north, by all living things, even 
to the dripping trees, and the rocks furrowed by the 

1 Fraser's Magazine, June 1867. 

B 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



autumn rains ; when Freya, the goddess of youth 
and love, went forth over the earth each spring, 
while the flowers broke forth under her tread over 
the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her with 
song; when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths- 
and South Swedes had, on the return of spring, a 
mock battle between summer and winter, and wel- 
comed the returning splendour of the sun with 
dancing and mutual feasting, rejoicing that a better 
season for fishing and hunting was approaching ? To 
those simpler children of a simpler age, in more 
direct contact with the daily and yearly facts of 
Nature, and more dependent on them for their bodily 
food and life, winter and spring were the two great 
facts of existence ; the symbols, the one of death, the 
other of life; and the battle between the two — the 
battle of the sun with darkness, of winter with spring, 
of death with life, of bereavement with love — lay at 
the root of all their myths and all their creeds. 
Surely a change has come over our fancies. The 
seasons are little to us now. We are nearly as com- 
fortable in winter as in summer, or in spring. Nay, 
we have begun, of late, to grumble at the two latter 
as much as at the former, and talk (and not without 
excuse at times) of ' the treacherous month of May,' 
and of ' summer having set in with its usual severity.' 
We work for the most part in cities and towns, and 



'A CHARM OF BIRDS. 



the seasons pass by us unheeded. May and June are 
spent by most educated people anywhere rather than 
among birds and flowers. They do not escape into 
the country till the elm hedges are growing black, 
and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all 
the virgin bloom of the country has passed into a 
sober and matronly ripeness — if not into the sere and 
yellow leaf. Our very landscape painters, till Cres- 
wick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that 
trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few 
but brown autumnal scenes. As for the song of birds, 
of which in the middle age no poet could say enough, 
our modern poets seem to be forgetting that birds 
ever sing. 

It was not so of old. The climate, perhaps, was 
more severe than now ; the transition from winter to 
spring more sudden, like that of Scandinavia now. 
Clearage of forests and drainage of land have equal- 
ized our seasons, or rather made them more uncertain. 
More broken winters are followed by more broken 
springs ; and May-day is no longer a marked point to 
be kept as a festival by all childlike hearts. The 
merry month of May is merry only in stage songs. 
The May garlands and dances are all but gone : the 
borrowed plate, and the milkmaids who borrowed it, 
gone utterly. No more does Mrs. Pepys go to ' lie at 
Woolwich, in order to a little ayre and to gather 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



May-dew ' for her complexion, by Mrs. Turner's advice. 
The Maypole is gone likewise ; and never more shall 
the puritan soul of a Stubbs be aroused in indigna- 
tion at seeing ' against Maie, every parish, towne, and 
village assemble themselves together, both men, women, 
and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and 
goe into the woodes and groves, hilles and mountaines, 
where they spend the night in pastyme, and in the 
morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes 
and braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. 
. . . They have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every 
oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers tyed on the 
tippe of his homes, and these draw home this May- 
pole (this stincking idol rather) which is covered all 
over with flowers . : and hearbes, with two or three 
hundred men, women, and children following it with 
great devotion. . . . And then they fall to banquet 
and feast, daunce and leap about it, as the heathen 
people did at the dedication of their idolles, whereof 
this is a perfect pattern, or the thing itself.' 

This, and much more, says poor Stubbs, in his 
' Anatomie of Abuses,' and had, no doubt, good reason 
enough for his virtuous indignation at May-day scan- 
dals. But people may be made dull without being 
made good; and the direct and only effect of putting 
down May games and such like was to cut off the 
dwellers in towns from all healthy communion with 



' A CHARM OF BIRDS: 



Nature, and leave them to mere sottishness and 
brutality. 

Yet perhaps the May games died out, partly 
because the feelings which had given rise to them 
died out before improved personal comforts. Of old, 
men and women fared hardly, and slept cold; and 
were thankful to Almighty God for every beam of sun- 
shine which roused them out of their long hyberna- 
tion; thankful for every flower and every bird which 
reminded them that joy was stronger than sorrow, and 
life than death. With the spring came not only labour, 
but enjoyment : 

' In the spring, the young man's fancy lightly turned to thoughts 
of love, ' 

as lads and lasses, who had been pining for each other 
by their winter firesides, met again, like Daphnis 
and Chloe, by shaugh and lea; and learnt to sing 
from the songs of birds, and to be faithful from their 
faithfulness. 

Then went out troops of fair damsels to seek spring 
garlands in the forest, as Scheffel has lately sung once 
more in his 'Frau Aventiure;' and, while the dead 
leaves rattled beneath their feet, hymned ' La Eegine 
Avrillouse ' to the music of some Minnesinger, whose 
song was as the song of birds; to whom the birds 
were friends, fellow-lovers, teachers, mirrors of all 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



which lie felt within himself of joyful and tender, true 
and pure ; friends to be fed hereafter (as Walther von 
der Vogelweide had them fed) with crumbs upon his 
grave. 

True melody, it must be remembered, is unknown, 
at least at present, in the tropics, and peculiar to the 
races of those temperate climes, into which the song- 
birds come in spring. It is hard to say why. Ex- 
quisite songsters, and those, strangely, of an European 
type, may be heard anywhere in tropical American 
forests: but native races whose hearts their song- 
can touch, are either extinct or yet to come. Some 
of the old German Minnelieder, on the other hand, 
seem actually copied from the songs of birds. ' Tande- 
radei ' does not merely ask the nightingale to tell no 
tales ; it repeats, in its cadences, the nightingale's song, 
as the old Minnesinger heard it when he nestled 
beneath the lime-tree with his love. They are often 
almost as inarticulate, these old singers, as the birds 
from whom they copied their notes ; the thinnest chain 
of thought links together some bird-like refrain : but 
they make up for their want of logic and reflection 
by the depth of their passion, the perfectness of their 
harmony with nature. The inspired Swabian, wan- 
dering in the pine-forest, listens to the blackbird's 
voice till it becomes his own voice ; and he breaks 
out, with the very carol of the blackbird — 



' a chaejj of birds: 



< Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell. 
Pfeifet de Wald ans und ein, wo wird mein Schatze sein ? 
Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.' 

And he has nothing more to say. That is his whole 
soul for the time being ; and, like a bird, he sings it 
over and over again, and never tires. 

Another, a Meder-Eheinischer, watches the moon 
rise over the Lowenburg, and thinks upon his love 
within the castle hall, till he breaks out in a strange, 
sad, tender melody — not without stateliness and manly 
confidence in himself and in his beloved — in the true 
strain of the nightingale : 

' Verstohlen geht der Mond auf, 
Blau, blau, Bliimelein, 
Durch Silberwolkchen fiihrt sein Lauf. 
Kosen irn Thai, Madel im Saal, schonste Rosa ! 

Und siehst du mich, 

Und siehst du sie, 

Blau, blau, Bliimelein, 

Zwei treu're Herzen sah'st du nie ; 

Bosen im Thai u. s. w. ' 

There is little sense in the words, doubtless, according 
to our modern notions of poetry; but they are like 
enough to the long, plaintive notes of the nightingale 
to say all that the poet has to say, again and again 
through all his stanzas. 

Thus the birds were, to the mediieval singers, their 
orchestra, or, rather their chorus ; from the birds thev 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



caught their melodies ; the sounds which the birds gave 
them they rendered into words. 

And the same bird key-note surely is to be traced in 
the early English and Scotch songs and ballads, with 
their often meaningless refrains, sung for the mere 
pleasure of singing : 



Or- 



Or— 



'Binnorie, Binnorie.' 



' With a hey lillelu and a how lo Ian, 
And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie.' 



' She sat down below a thorn, 
Fine flowers in the valley, 
And there has she her sweet babe born, 
And the green leaves they grow rarely. ' 

Or even those ' fal-la-las/ and other nonsense refrains, 
which, if they were not meant to imitate bird-notes, 
for what were they meant ? 

In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird key- 
note. He who wrote (and a great rhymer he was) 

'As I was walking all alane, 
I heard twa corbies making a mane,' 

had surely the ' mane ' of the ' corbies ' in his ears 
before it shaped itself into words in his mind : and he 
had listened to many a ' woodwele ' who first thrummed 
on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how — 



1 A CHARM OF BIRDS.' 



' In summer, when the shawes be shene, 
And leaves be large and long, 
It is full merry in fair forest 
To hear the fowles' song. 

' The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease, 

Sitting upon the spray ; 
So loud, it wakened Robin Hood 

In the greenwood where he lay.' 

And Shakespeare — are not his scraps of song 
saturated with these same bird-notes ? ' Where the 
bee sucks/ 'When daisies pied/ 'Under the green- 
wood tree/ ' It was a lover and his lass/ ' When daf- 
fodils begin to peer/ 'Ye spotted snakes/ have all a 
ring in them which was caught not in the roar of 
London, or the babble of the Globe theatre, but in 
the woods of Charlecote, and along the banks of 
Avon, from 

' The ouzel-cock so black of hue, 

With orange-tawny bill ; 
The throstle with his note so true ; 

The wren with little quill ; 
The finch, the sparrow, and the lark, 

The plain -song cuckoo gray' — 

and all the rest of the birds of the air. 

Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs 
are truly songful, and fit to be set to music ? Is it 
not that the writers of them — persons often of much 
taste and poetic imagination — have gone for their 
inspiration to the intellect, rather than to the ear? 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



That (as Shelley does by the skylark, and Words- 
worth by the cuckoo), instead of trying to sing like 
the birds, they only think and talk about the birds, 
and therefore, however beautiful and true the thoughts 
and words may be, they are not song? Surely they 
have not, like the mediaeval songsters, studied the 
speech of the birds, the primaeval teachers of melody ; 
nor even melodies already extant, round which, as 
round a framework of pure music, their thoughts and 
images might crystallize themselves, certain thereby 
of becoming musical likewise. The best modern 
song writers, Burns and Moore, were inspired by 
their old national airs ; and followed them, Moore 
at least, with a reverent fidelity, which has had its 
full reward. They wrote words to music ; and not, 
as modern poets are wont, wrote the words first, and 
left others to set music to the words. They were 
right ; and we are wrong. As long as song is to 
be the expression of pure emotion, so long it must 
take its key from music, — which is already pure 
emotion, untranslated into the grosser medium of 
thought and speech — often (as in the case of Mendels- 
sohn's Songs without Words) not to be translated into 
it at all. 

And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets 
may go back, like the old Minnesingers, to the birds of 
the forest, and learn of them to sing. 



'A CHARM 01'' BIRDS: 



And little do most of them know how much there is 
to learn ; what variety of character, as well as variety 
of emotion, may be distinguished by the practised ear, 
in a ' charm of birds ' (to use the old southern phrase), 
from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing from 
afar in the first bright days of March, a passage of one 
or two bars repeated three or four times, and then 
another and another, clear and sweet, and yet defiant — 
for the great 'stormcock' loves to sing when rain and 
wind is coming on, and faces the elements as boldly as 
he faces hawk and crow — down to the delicate warble 
of the wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown 
bank, where he has huddled through the frost with wife 
and children, all folded in each other's arms like human 
beings, for the sake of warmth, — which, alas ! does not 
always suffice ; for many a lump of wrens may be 
found, frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter. 
Yet even he, sitting at his house-door in the low 
sunlight, says grace for all mercies (as a little child 
once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, so loud, 
and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at 
the amount of soul within that tiny body ; and then 
stops suddenly, as a child who has said its lesson, oi 
got to the end of the sermon, gives a self-satisfied flirt 
of his tail, and goes in again to sleep. 

Character 1 I know not how much variety of cha- 
racter there may be between birds of the same species : 



H 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



but between species and species the variety is endless, 

and IS shown as I fondly helieve in l.lic difference; of 

fcheir notes, Each has Its own speech, Inarticulate, 
expressing not thought but hereditary feeling ; save a 
few birds who, like those little dumb darlings, the 
spotted flycatchers, seem fco have absolutely nothing to 
say, and accordingly have fche wii, fco hold fcheirtonguea ; 

and devote the whole of fln-ir v.uv.iW intellect to sifting 

on the iron rails, flitting off them a yard or two fco catch 
a butterfly In air, and flitting back with it fco fcheir nest, 
But listen fco fche charm of birds in any seques- 
tered woodland, on a bright forenoon in June. A:, 
yon \,iy fco disentangle fche medley of sounds, fche first, 
perhaps, wind, will strike .your our will be the loud, 
harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch ; 
and fche metallic clinking of two or fliree sorts of 
titmice. But above fche tree tops, rising, hovering, 
sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tender and low. 
Aliove the pastures outside the skylarls sings as he 

alone can sing; and clone l.y, from flic hollies rings out 

the blackbird's tenor rollicking, audacious, humorous, 
all but articulate, from the tree above him rises the 
treble of fche thrush, pure as the song of angels: more 
pure, perhaps, in tone, though neither so varied nor 
so rich, as the song of the nightingale. And there,, 
in. the next holly, Is the nightingale himself: now 
croaking like a frogj now balking aside to his wife 



<A CHARM OF BIRDS.' 



on the nest below; and now bursting out into that 
song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds 
Borrow, he himself surely finds none. All the morning 
he will sing ; and again at evening, till the small hours, 
and the chill before the dawn: but if his voice sounds 
melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mocked 
by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright 
morning that which it is, the fulness of joy and love. 
Milton's 

' Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly, 
Most musical, most melancholy,' 

is untrue to fact. So far from shunning the noise of 
folly, the nightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close 
to a stage-coach road, or a public path, as anyone will 
testify who recollects the ' Wrangler's Walk ' from 
Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, when the 
covert, which has now become hollow and shelterless, 
held, at every twenty yards, an unabashed and jubilant 
nightingale. 

Coleridge surely was not far wrong when lie guessed 
that— 

'Some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced 
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong, 
( )r slow distemper, or neglected Love 
(And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself, 
And made all gentle sounds tell bach the tale 
Of bis own sorrow) -he, and such as he, 
First named these sounds a melancholy strain, 
Ami many a poet echoes the conceit.' 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



That the old Greek poets were right, and had some 
grounds for the myth of Philomela, I do not dispute ; 
though Sophocles, speaking of the nightingales of 
Colonos, certainly does not represent them as lamenting. 
The Elizabethan poets, however, when they talked of 
Philomel, 'her breast against a thorn/ were unaware 
that they and the Greeks were talking of two different 
birds ; that our English Lusciola Luscinia is not Lus- 
ciola Philomela, one of the various birds called Bulbul 
in the East. The true Philomel hardly enters Venetia, 
hardly crosses the Swiss Alps, ventures not into the 
Bhine-land and Denmark, but penetrates (strangely 
enough) further into South Sweden than our own 
Luscinia : ranging meanwhile over all Central Europe, 
Persia, and the East, even to Egypt. Whether his song 
be really sad, let those who have heard him say. But 
as for our own Luscinia, who winters not in Egypt and 
Arabia, but in Morocco and Algeria, the only note of 
his which can be mistaken for sorrow, is rather one 
of too great joy ; that cry, which is his highest feat of 
art ; which he cannot utter when he first comes to our 
shores, but practises carefully, slowly, gradually, till he 
has it perfect by the beginning of June ; that cry, long, 
repeated, loudenirjg and sharpening in the intensity 
of rising passion, till it stops suddenly, exhausted at 
the point where pleasure, from very keenness, turns to 
pain ; and — ■ 



' A CHARM OF B1BDS.' 



' In the topmost height of joy 
His passion clasps a secret grief.' 

How different in character from his song is that of 
the gallant little black-cap in the tree above him. A 
gentleman he is of a most ancient house, perhaps the 
oldest of European singing birds. How perfect must 
have been the special organization which has spread, 
seemingly without need of alteration or improvement, 
from Norway to the Cape of Good Hope, from Japan 
to the Azores. How many ages must have passed since 
his forefathers first got their black caps. And how 
intense and fruitful must have been the original 
vitality which, after so many generations, can still fill 
that little body with so strong a soul, and make him 
sing as Milton's new-created birds sang to Milton's 
Eve in Milton's Paradise. Sweet he is, and various, 
rich, and strong, beyond all English warblers, save 
the nightingale : but his speciality is his force, his 
rush, his overflow, not so much of love as of happiness. 
The spirit carries him away. He riots up and down 
the gamut till he cannot stop himself; his notes 
tumble over each other ; he chuckles, laughs, shrieks 
with delight, throws back his head, droops his tail, sets 
up his back, and sings with every fibre of his body : 
and yet he never forgets his good manners. He is 
never coarse, never harsh, for a single note. Always 

K C 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



graceful, always sweet, lie keeps perfect delicacy in his 
most utter carelessness. 

And why should we overlook, common though he he, 
yon hedge-sparrow, who is singing so modestly, and 
yet so firmly and so true ? Or cock-rohin himself, 
who is here, as everywhere, honest, self-confident, and 
cheerful ? Most people are not aware, one sometimes 
fancies, how fine a singer is cock-rohin now in the 
spring-time, when his song is drowned by, or at least 
confounded with, a dozen other songs. We know him 
and love him best in winter, when he takes up (as he 
does sometimes in cold wet summer days) that sudden 
wistful warble, struggling to be happy, half in vain, 
which surely contradicts Coleridge's verse : — 

' In Nature there is nothing melancholy.' 

But he who will listen carefully to the robin's 
breeding song on a bright day in May, will agree, I 
think, that he is no mean musician ; and that for 
force, variety and character of melody, he is surpassed 
only by black-cap, thrush, and nightingale. 

And what is that song, sudden, loud, sweet, yet 
faltering, as if half ashamed ? Is it the willow wren 
or the garden warbler ? The two birds, though very 
remotely allied to each other, are so alike in voice, that 
it is often difficult to distinguish them, unless we 
attend carefully to the expression. For the garden 



'A CHARM OF BIRDS: 



warbler, beginning in high and loud notes, runs down 
in cadence, lower and softer, till joy seems conquered 
by very weariness ; while the willow wren, with a 
sudden outbreak of cheerfulness, though not quite sure 
(it is impossible to describe bird-songs without attri- 
buting to the birds human passions and frailties) that 
he is not doing a silly thing, struggles on to the end of 
his story with a hesitating hilarity, in feeble imitation 
of the black-cap's bacchanalian dactyls. 
And now, again — is it true that 

' In Nature there is nothing melancholy ' ? 

Mark that slender, graceful, yellow warbler, running 
along the high oak boughs like a perturbed spirit, 
seeking restlessly, anxiously, something which he seems 
never to find ; and uttering every now and then a long 
anxious cry, four or five times repeated, which would 
be a squeal, were it not so sweet. Suddenly he flits 
away, and flutters round the pendant tips of the beech- 
sprays like a great yellow butterfly, picking the insects 
from the leaves ; then flits back to a bare bough, and 
sings, with heaving breast and quivering wings, a short, 
shrill, feeble, tremulous song ; and then returns to his 
old sadness, wandering and complaining all day long. 
Is there no melancholy in that cry ? It sounds sad : 
why should it not be meant to be sad ? We recognize 
joyful notes, angry notes, fearful notes. They are very 

c 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



similar (strangely enough) in all birds. They are very 
similar (more strangely still) to the cries of human 
beings, especially children, when influenced by the same 
passions. And when we hear a note which to us 
expresses sadness, why should not the bird be sad? 
Yon wood wren has had enough to make him sad, 
if only he recollects it ; and if he can recollect his 
road from Morocco hither, he may be recollects like- 
wise what happened on the road — the long weary 
journey up the Portuguese coast, and through the gap 
between the Pyrenees and the Jaysquivel, and up the 
Landes of Bordeaux, and across Brittany, flitting by 
night, and hiding and feeding as he could by day ; and 
how his mates flew against the lighthouses, and were 
killed by hundreds ; and how he essayed the British 
Channel, and was blown back, shrivelled up by bitter 
blasts ; and how he felt, nevertheless, that ' that wan 
water he must cross,' he knew not why : but something 
told him that his mother had done it before him, and 
he was flesh of her flesh, life of her life, and had 
inherited her e instinct' — as we call hereditary memory, 
in order to avoid the trouble of finding out what it is, 
and how it comes. A duty was laid on him to go back 
to the place where he was bred ; and he must do it : 
and now it is done ; and he is weary, and sad, and 
lonely ; and, for aught we know, thinking already that 
when the leaves begin to turn yellow, he must go back 



'A CHARM OF BIRDS: 



again, over the Channel, over the Landes, over th s 
Pyrenees, to Morocco once more. Why should lie not 
be sad ? He is a very delicate bird, as both his shape 
and his note testify. He can hardly keep up his race 
here in England ; and is accordingly very uncommon, 
while his two cousins, the willow wren and the chiff- 
chaff, who, like him, build for some mysterious reason 
domed nests upon the ground, are stout, and busy, and 
numerous, and thriving everywhere. And what he has 
gone through may be too much for the poor wood wren's 
nerves ; and he gives way ; while willow wren, black- 
cap, nightingale, who have gone by the same road and 
suffered the same dangers, have stoutness of heart 
enough to throw off the past, and give themselves up 
to present pleasure. Why not? — who knows? There 
is labour, danger, bereavement, death in nature ; and 
why should not some, at least, of the so-called dumb 
things know it, and grieve at it as well as we ? 

Why not ? — Unless we yield to the assumption (for it 
is nothing more) that these birds act by some unknown 
thing called instinct, as it might be called x or y ; and 
are, in fact, just like the singing birds which spring out 
of snuff-boxes, only so much better made, that they can 
eat, grow, and propagate their species. The imputation 
of acting by instinct cuts both ways. We, too, are 
creatures of instinct. We breathe and eat by instinct : 
but we talk and build houses by reason. And so may 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the birds. It is more philosophical, surely, to attribute 
actions in them to the same causes to which we attribute 
them (from experience) in ourselves. ' But if so,' some 
will say, ' birds must have souls.' We must define 
what our own souls are, before we can define what kind 
of soul or no-soul a bird may or may not have. The 
truth is, that we want to set up some ' dignity of human 
nature ; ' some innate superiority to the animals, on 
which we may pride ourselves as our own possession, 
and not return thanks with fear and trembling for it, as 
the special gift of Almighty God. So we have given 
the poor animals over to the mechanical philosophy, 
and allowed thein to be considered as only mere 
cunningly devised pieces of watch-work, if philosophy 
would only spare us, and our fine human souls, of 
which we are so proud, though they are doing all the 
wrong and folly they can from one week's end to the 
other. And now our self-conceit has brought its own 
Nemesis ; the mechanical philosophy is turning on us, 
and saying, ' The bird's " nature " and your " human 
nature " differ only in degree, but not in kind. If they 
are machines, so are you. They have no souls, you 
confess. You have none either.' 

But there are those who neither yield to the mecha- 
nical philosophy nor desire to stifle it. While it is 
honest and industrious, as it is now, it can do nought 
but good, because it can do nought but discover facts. 



1 A CHARM OF BIRDS: 



It will only help to divide the light from the darkness, 
truth from dreams, health from disease. Let it claim 
for itself all that it can prove to be of the flesh, fleshly. 
That which is spiritual will stand out more clearly 
as of the Spirit. Let it thrust scalpel and microscope 
into the most sacred penetralia of brain and nerve. 
It will only find everywhere beneath brain and beneath 
nerve, that substance and form which is not matter 
nor phenomenon, but the Divine cause thereof; and 
while it helps, with ruthless but wholesome severity, 
to purge our minds from idols of the cave and idols of 
the fane, it will leave untouched, more clearly defined, 
and therefore more sacred and important than ever — 

' Those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 

Are yet the master light of all our seeing ; 
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 

Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal silence ; truths that wake 

To perish never ; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, 
Nor man nor boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
Can utterly abolish or destroy. 

Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound,' 

as the poet-philosopher bids you. Victorious analysis 
will neither abolish you, nor the miraculous and un- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



fathomable in you and in your song, which has stirred 
the hearts of poets since first man was man. And if 
anyone shall hint to us that we and the birds may have 
sprung originally from the same type ; that the differ- 
ence between our intellect and theirs is one of degree, 
and not of kind, we may believe or doubt : but in either 
case we shall not be greatly moved. 'So much the 
better for the birds,' we will say, ' and none the worse 
for us. You raise the birds towards us: but you do 
not lower us towards them. What we are, we are by 
the grace of God. Our own powers and the burden 
of them we know full well. It does not lessen their 
dignity or their beauty in our eyes to hear that the 
birds of the air partake, even a little, of the same gifts 
of God as we. Of old said St. Guthlac in Crowland, as 
the swallows sat upon his knee, " He who leads his life 
according to the will of God, to him the wild deer and 
the wild birds draw more near ; " and this new theory 
of yours may prove St. Guthlac right. St. Francis, too 
— he called the birds his brothers. Whether he was 
correct, either theologically or zoologically, he was 
plainly free from that fear of being mistaken for an ape, 
which haunts so many in these modern times. Per- 
fectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he 
thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual 
beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh ; 
and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature 



' A CHARM OF BIRDS.' 



in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so beau- 
tiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his old- 
fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even as angels 
did in heaven. In a word, the saint, though he was an 
ascetic, and certainly no man of science, was yet a poet, 
and somewhat of a philosopher ; and would have pos- 
sibly — so do extremes meet — have hailed as orthodox, 
while we hail as truly scientific, Wordsworth's great 
saying — 

' Therefore am I still 
A lover of the meadows and the 'woods 
And mountains ; and of all that we behold 
From this green earth ; of all the mighty world 
Of eye and ear — both what they half create, 
And what perceive ; well pleased to recognize 
In Kature and the language of the sense, 
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, 
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul 
Of all my moral being.' 



II. 

CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



Iji: 1 



%. 



II. 

CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 1 

Fishing is generally associated in men's minds with 
wild mountain scenery ; if not with the alps and 
cataracts of Norway, still with the moors and lochs of 
Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the wooded 
crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, 
Hereford, or the Lowlands. And it cannot be denied 
that much of the charm which angling exercises over 
cultivated minds, is due to the beauty and novelty 
of the landscapes which surround him ; to the sense 
of freedom, the exhilarating upland air. Who would 
prefer the certainty of taking trout out of some sluggish 
X>reserve, to the chance of a brace out of Edno or Llyn 
Dulyn ? The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but 
in the pains which it has cost ; in the upward climbs 
through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled 
stream ; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay 
1 Preiser's Magazine, September 1858. 



30 PROSE IDYLLS. 

flower-bed of blue and purple butter- wort ; the steady 
breathless climb up the crags, which looked but one 
mile from you when you started, so clear against the 
sky stood out every knoll and slab ; the first stars of the 
white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy 
had pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon 
some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack of 
the cliff; the first grey tufts of the Alpine club-moss, 
the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green rose-root, with 
its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the 
two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine 
world ; the scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry 
sea aloft, as you beat round and round like a weary 
pointer dog in search of the hidden lake ; the last de- 
spairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid 
on Moel Meirch ; the hasty gaze around, far away into 
the green vale of Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and 
long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue 
sea flecked with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and 
wildernesses of mountaiu peaks, east, west, south, and 
north ; one glance at the purple gulf out of which 
Snow don rises, thence only seen in full majesty from 
base to peak : and then the joyful run, springing over 
bank and boulder, to the sad tarn beneath your feet : 
the loosening of the limbs, as you toss yourself, bathed 
in perspiration, on the turf ; the almost awed pause as 
you recollect that you are alone on the mountain-tops, 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



by the side of the desolate pool, out of all hope of 
speech or help of man; and, if you break your leg 
among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick 
your bones ; the anxious glance round the lake to see 
if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance 
through your book to guess what they •will choose to 
take ; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow 
feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled 
monster from Amboyna or Brazil — may tempt those 
sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for 
once their life-long business of picking leeches from 
among those Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles 
and break your shins for the next three hours. What 
matter (to a minute philosopher, at least) if, after two 
hours of such enjoyment as that, he goes down again 
into the world of man with empty creel, or with a 
dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter, gamer, and 
redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or Ken- 
net ? What matter ? If he has not caught them, he 
might have caught them ; he has been catching them in 
imagination all the way up ; and if he be a minute phi- 
losopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb than 
that devil's beatitude — ' Blessed is he who expecteth 
nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.' 

Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, 
for he enjoys everything once at least : and if it falls 
out true, twice also. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Yes. Pleasant enough is mountain fishing. But 
there is one objection against it, that it is hard work 
to get to it ; and that the angler, often enough half- 
tired before he arrives at his stream or lake, has left 
for his day's work only the lees of his nervous energy. 

Another objection, more important perhaps to a 
minute philosopher than to the multitude, is, that there 
is in mountain-fishing an element of excitement : an 
element which is wholesome enough at times for every 
one ; most wholesome at all times for the man pent up 
in London air and London work ; but which takes away 
from the angler's most delicate enjoyment, that dreamy 
contemplative repose, broken by just enough amusement 
to keep his body active, while his mind is quietly taking 
in every sight and sound of nature. Let the Londoner 
have his six weeks every year among crag and heather, 
and return with lungs expanded and muscles braced to 
his nine months' prison. The countryman, who needs no 
such change of air and scene, will prefer more home- 
like, though more homely, pleasures. Dearer than wild 
cataracts or Alpine glens are the still hidden streams 
which Bewick has immortalized in his vignettes, and 
Creswick in his pictures ; the long glassy shallow, 
paved with yellow gravel, where he wades up between 
low walls of fern-fringed rock, beneath nut, and oak, 
and alder, to the low bar over which the stream 
comes swirling and dimpling, as the water-ouzel flits 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



piping before him, and the murmur of the ringdove 
comes soft and sleepy through the wood. There, as he 
-wades, he sees a hundred sights and hears a hundred 
tones, which are hidden from the traveller on the dusty 
highway above. The traveller fancies that he has seen 
the country. So he has ; the outside of it, at least : but 
the angler only sees the inside. The angler only is 
brought close face to face with the flower, and bird, and 
insect life of the rich river banks, the only part of the 
landscape where the hand of man has never interfered, 
and the only part in general which never feels the 
drought of summer, * the trees planted by the waterside 
whose leaf shall not wither.' 

Pleasant are those hidden waterways : but yet are 
they the more pleasant because the hand of man has 
not interfered with them ? 

It is a question, and one which the older one grows 
the less one is inclined to answer in the affirmative. 
The older one grows, the more there grows on one the 
sense of waste and incompleteness in all scenery where 
man has not fulfilled the commission of Eden, ' to dress 
it and to keep it ;' and with that, a sense of loneliness 
which makes one long for home, and cultivation, and 
the speech of fellow men. 

Surely the influence of mountain scenery is exagge- 
rated now-a-days. In spite of the reverend name of 
Wordsworth (whose poetry, be it remembered, too often 
K D 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



wants that element of hardihood and manliness which 
is supposed to be the birthright of mountaineers), one 
cannot help, as a lowlander, hoping that there is a little 
truth in the threnodes of a certain peevish friend who 
literally hates a mountain, and justifies his hatred in 
this fashion : — 

' I do hate mountains. I would not live among 
them for ten thousand a year. If they look like para- 
dise for three months in the summer, they are a veri- 
table inferno for the other nine ; and I should like to 
condemn my mountain- worshipping friends to pass a 
whole year under the shadow of Snowdon, with that 
great black head of his shutting out the sunlight, 
staring -down into their garden, overlooking all they do 
in the most impertinent way, sneezing and spitting at 
them with rain, hail, snow, and bitter freezing blasts, 
even in the hottest sunshine. A mountain ? He is a 
great stupid giant, with a perpetual cold in his head, 
whose highest ambition is to give you one also. As for 
his beauty, no natural object has so little of its own ; 
he owes it to the earthquakes that reared him up, to the 
rains and storms which have furrowed him, to every 
gleam and cloud which pass over him. In himself he 
is a mere helpless stone-heap. Our old Scandinavian 
forefathers were right when they held the mountain 
Yotuns to be helpless pudding-headed giants, the sport 
of gods and men : and their English descendant, in 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



spite of all his second-hand sentiment, holds the same 
opinion at his heart ; for his first instinct, jolly honest 
fellow that he is, on seeing a snow alp, is to scramble 
up it aud smoke his cigar upon the top. And this 
great stupid braggart, pretending to be a personage 
and an entity, which, like Pope's monument on Fish- 
street hill, 

"Like a tall bully, lifts the head aud lies," 

I am called upon now-a-days to worship, as my better, 
my teacher. Shall I, the son of Odin and Thor, wor- 
ship Hrymir the frost giant, and his cows the water- 
falls ? Shall I bow down to the stock of a stone ? 
My better ? I have done an honest thing or two in 
my life, but I never saw a mountain do one yet. As 
for his superiority to me, in what does it consist ? His 
strength ? If he be stronger than I, let him cut stones 
out of my ribs, as I can out of his. His size ? Am I 
to respect a mountain the more for being 10,000 feet 
high ? As well ask me to respect Daniel Lambert for 
weighing five-and-twenty stone. His cunning con- 
struction ? There is not a child which plays at his foot, 
not an insect which basks on his crags, which is not 
more fearfully and wonderfully made ; while as for his 
grandeur of form, any college youth who scrambles up 
him, peel him out of his shooting jacket and trousers, 
is a hundred times more beautiful, and more grand too, 

D 2 



36 PEOSE IDYLLS, 



by all laws of art. But so it is. In our prurient pru- 
dery, we have got to despise the human, and therefore 
the truly divine, element in art, and look for inspira- 
tion, not to living men and women, but to leaves and 
straws, stocks and stones. It is an idolatry baser than 
that of the old Canaanites ; for they had the courage 
to go up to the mountain tops, and thence worship 
the host of heaven : but we are to stay at the bottom, 
and worship the mountains themselves. Byron began 
the folly with his misanthropic "Childe Harold." 
Sermons in stones ? I don't believe in them. I have 
seen a better sermon in an old peasant woman's face 
than in all the Alps and Apennines of Europe. Did 
you ever see any one who was the better for moun- 
tains ? Have the Alps made * * * a whit honester, 
or * * * a whit more good-natured, or Lady * * * a 
whit cleverer? Do they alter one hair's breadth for 
the better the characters of the ten thousand male and 
female noodles who travel forth to stare at them every 
year ? Do mountains make them lofty-minded and 
generous-hearted ? No. Cselum, non animum mutant, 
qui trans mare currant. Don't talk to me of the moral 
and physical superiority of mountain races, for I tell 
you it is a dream. Civilization, art, poetry, belong to 
the lowlands. Are the English mountaineers, pray, or 
the French, or the Germans ? Were the Egyptians 
mountaineers, or the Eomans, or the Assyrians, as soon 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 37 

as they became a people ? The Greeks lived among 
mountains, but they took care to inhabit the plains ; 
and it was the sea and not the hills which made them 
the people which they were. Does Scotland owe her 
life to the highlander, or to the lowlander ? If you 
want an experimentum crucis, there is one. As for 
poetry, will you mention to me one mountain race 
which has written great poetry ? You will quote the 
Hebrews. I answer that the life of Palestine always 
kept to the comparatively low lands to the west of 
Jordan, while the barbarous mountaineers of the eastern 
range never did anything, — had but one Elijah to show 
among them. Shakspeare never saw a hill higher 
than Malvern Beacon; and yet I suppose you will 
call him a poet? Mountaineers look well enough 
at a distance; seen close at hand you find their 
chief distinctions to be starvation and ignorance, fleas 
and goitre, with an utter unconsciousness — unless 
travellers put it into their heads — of the " soul-ele- 
vating glories" by which they have been surrounded 
all their lives.' 

He was gently reminded of the existence of the 
Tyrolese. 

'You may just as wisely remind me of the Circas- 
sians. What can prove my theory more completely 
than the fact that in them you have the two finest 
races of the world, utterly unable to do anything for 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



humanity, utterly unable to develop themselves, be- 
cause, to their eternal misfortune, they have got caged 
among those abominable stoneheaps, and have not yet 
been able to escape ? ' 

It was suggested that if mountain races were gene- 
rally inferior ones, it was because they were the rem- 
nants of conquered tribes driven up into the highlands 
by invaders. 

' And what does that prove but that the stronger and 
cunninger races instinctively seize the lowlands, be- 
cause they half know (and Providence knows altogether) 
that there alone they can become nations, and fulfil the 
primaeval mission — to replenish the earth and subdue 
it? No, no, my good sir. Mountains are very well 
when they are doing their only duty— that of making 
rain and soil for the lowlands : but as for this new- 
fangled admiration of them, it is a proof that our senses 
are dulled by luxury and books, and that we require to 
excite our palled organ of marvellousness by signs and 
wonders, aesthetic brandy and cayenne. No. I have 
remarked often that the most unimaginative people, 
who can see no beauty in a cultivated English field 
or in the features of a new-born babe, are the loudest 
ravers about glorious sunsets and Alpine panoramas ; 
just as the man with no music in his soul, to whom 
a fugue of Sebastian Bach, or one of Mendelssohn's 
Songs without Words, means nothing, and is nothing 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



thinks a monster concert of drums and trumpets im- 
" commonly fine.' 

This is certainly a sufficiently one-sided diatribe. 
Still it is one-sided : and we have heard so much of the 
other side of late, that it may be worth while to give 
this side also a fair and patient hearing. 

At least he who writes wishes that it may have a 
fair hearing. He has a sort of sympathy with Lord 
Macaulay's traveller of a hundred and fifty years since, 
who amid the ' horrible desolation ' of the Scotch 
highlands, sighs for ' the true mountain scenery of 
Richmond-hill.' The most beautiful landscape he has 
ever seen, or cares to see, is the vale of Thames from 
Taplow or from Cliefden, looking down towards Wind- 
sor, and up toward Reading ; to him Bramshill, looking 
out far and wide over the rich lowland from its eyrie 
of dark pines, or Littlecote nestling between deer- 
spotted upland and rich water-meadow, is a finer sight 
than any robber castle of the Rhine. He would not 
complain, of course, were either of the views backed, 
like those glorious ones of Turin or Venice, by the 
white saw-edge of the distant Alps : but chiefly because 
the perpetual sight of that Alp-wall would increase the 
sense of home, of guarded security, which not the 
mountain, but the sea, or the very thought of the sea, 
gives to all true Englishmen. 

Let others therefore (to come back to angling) tell 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



of moor and loch. But let it be always remembered 
that the men who have told of them best have not been 
mountaineers, but lowlanders who carried up to the 
mountain the taste and knowledge which they had 
gained below. Let them remember that the great 
Sutherlandshire sportsman and sporting writer, the 
late Mr. St. John, was once a fine gentleman about 
town ; that Christopher North was an Edinburgh Pro- 
fessor, a man of city learning and city cultivation ; and, 
as one more plea for our cockney chalk-streams of 
the south, that Mr. Scrope (who passed many pleasant 
years respected and beloved by Kennet side, with 
Purdy at his heels) enjoyed, they say, the killing of 
a Littlecote trout as heartily as he did that of a 
Tweed salmon. 

Come, then, you who want pleasant fishing-days 
without the waste of time and trouble and expense 
involved in two hundred miles of railway journey, 
and perhaps fifty more of highland road ; and try what 
you can see and do among the fish not sixty miles from 
town. Come to pleasant country inns, where you can 
always get a good dinner ; or, better still, to pleasant 
country houses, where you can always get good society ; 
to rivers which will always fish, brimfull in the longest 
droughts of summer, instead of being, as those mountain 
ones are, very like a turnpike-road for three weeks, and 
then like bottled porter for three days ; to streams on 



CITA L K-S T Ii KA M S T U DIES. 



which you have strong south-west breezes for a week 
together on a clear fishing water, instead of having, as 
on those mountain ones, foul rain spate as long as the 
wind is south-west, and clearing water when the wind 
chops up to the north, and the chill blast of ' Clarus 
Aquilo ' sends all the fish shivering to the bottom ; 
streams, in a word, where you may kill fish (and large 
ones) four days out of five from April to October, in- 
stead of having, as you will most probably in the moun- 
tain, just one day's sport in the whole of your month's 
holiday. Deluded friend, who suffered in Scotland last 
year a month of Tantalus his torments, furnished by 
art and nature with rods, flies, whisky, scenery, keepers, 
salmon innumerable, and all that man can want, except 
water to fish in ; and who returned, having hooked ac- 
cidentally by the tail one salmon — which broke all and 
ween to sea — why did you not stay at home and take 
your two-pounders and three-pounders out of the quiet 
chalk brook which never sank an inch through all that 
drought, so deep in the caverns of the hills are hidden 
its mysterious wells ? Truly, wise men bide at home, 
with George Eiddler, while 'a fool's eyes are in the 
ends of the earth.' 

Eepent, then ; and come with me, at least in fancy, 
at six o'clock upon some breezy morning in June, not 
by roaring railway nor by smoking steamer, but in the 
cosy four-wheel, along brown heather moors, down 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



into green clay woodlands, over white chalk downs, 
past Roman camps and scattered blocks of Sarsden 
stone, till we descend into the long green vale where, 
among groves of poplar and abele, winds silver Whit. 
Come and breakfast at the neat white inn, of yore a 
posting-house of fame. The stables are now turned 
into cottages ; and instead of a dozen spruce ostlers and 
helpers, the last of the postboys totters sadly about the 
yard and looks up eagerly at the rare sight of a horse 
to feed. But the house keeps up enough of its ancient 
virtue to give us a breakfast worthy of Pantagruel's 
self ; and after it, while we are looking out our flies, 
you can go and chat with the old postboy, and hear 
his tales, told with a sort of chivalrous pride, of the 
noble lords and fair ladies before whom he has ridden 
in the good old times gone by — even, so he darkly 
hints, before ' His Eoyal Highness the Prince ' himself. 
Poor old fellow, he recollects not, and he need not 
recollect, that these great posting-houses were centres 
of corruption, from whence the newest vices of the 
metropolis were poured into the too-willing ears of 
village lads and lasses ; and that not even the New 
Poor Law itself has done more for the morality of the 
South of England than the substitution of the rail for 
coaches. 

Now we will walk down through the meadows some 
half mile. 



OH A LK-STREA M STUDIES. 



' While all the land in flower}'- squares, 
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind 
Smells of the coming summer,' 

to a scene which, as we may find its antitype any- 
where for miles round, we may boldly invent for our- 
selves. 

A red brick mill (not new red brick, of course) shall 
hum for ever below giant poplar-spires, which bend 
and shiver in the steady breeze. On its lawn labur- 
nums shall feather down like dropping wells of gold, 
and from under them the stream shall hurry leaping 
and laughing into the light, and spread at our feet into 
a broad bright shallow, in which the kine are standing 
knee-deep already : a hint, alas ! that the day means 
heat. And there, to the initiated eye, is another and 
a darker hint of glaring skies, perspiring limbs, and 
empty creels. Small fish are dimpling in the central 
eddies : but here, in six inches of water, on the very 
edge of the ford road, great tails and back-fins are 
showing above the surface, and swirling suddenly 
among the tufts of grass, sure sign that the large fish 
are picking up a minnow-breakfast at the same time 
that they warm their backs, and do not mean to look at 
a fly for many an hour to come. 

Yet courage ; for on the rail of yonder wooden bridge 
sits, chatting with a sun-browned nymph, her bonnet 
pushed over her face, her hayrake in her hand, a river- 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



god in coat of velveteen, elbow on knee and pipe in 
mouth, who, rising when he sees us, lifts his wide- 
awake, and halloas back a roar of comfort to our 
mystic adjuration, — 

' Keeper ! Is the fly up ? ' 
' Mortial strong last night, gentlemen.' 
Wherewith he shall lounge up to us, landing-net in 
hand, and we will wander up stream and away. 

We will wander — for though the sun be bright, here 
are good fish to be picked out of sharps and stop-holes 
— into the water-tables, ridged up centuries since into 
furrows forty feet broad and five feet high, over which 
the crystal water sparkles among the roots of the rich 
grass, and hurries down innumerable drains to find its 
parent stream between tufts of great blue geranium, 
and spires of purple loosestrife, and the delicate white 
and pink comfrey- bells, and the avens — fairest and 
most modest of all the water-side nymphs, who hangs 
her head all day long in pretty shame, with a soft blush 
upon her tawny cheek. .But at the mouth of each of 
those drains, if we can get our flies in, and keep our- 
selves unseen, we will have one cast at least. For at 
each of them, in some sharp-rippling spot, lies a great 
trout or two, waiting for beetle, caterpillar, and what- 
soever else may be washed from among the long grass 
above. Thence, and from brimming feeders, which slip 
along, weed-choked, under white hawthorn hedges, and 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



beneath the great roots of oak and elm, shall we pick 
out full many a goodly trout. There, in yon stop-hole 
underneath that tree, not ten feet hroad or twenty 
long, where just enough water trickles through the 
hatches to make a ripple, are a brace of noble fish, no 
doubt ; and one of them you may be sure of, if you will 
go the proper way to work, and fish scientifically with 
the brace of flies I have put on for you — a governor 
and a black alder. In the first place, you must throw 
up into the little pool, not down. If you throw down, 
they will see you in an instant ; and besides, you will 
never get your fly close under the shade of the brick- 
work, where alone you have a chance. What use in 
throwing into the still shallow tail, shining like oil in 
the full glare of the sun ? 

' But I cannot get below the pool without ' 

Without crawling through that stiff stubbed hedge, 
well set with trees, and leaping that ten-foot feeder 
afterwards. Very well. It is this sort of thing which 
makes the stay-at-home cultivated chalk-fishing as 
much harder work than mountain angling, as a gallop 
over a stiffly enclosed country is harder than one over 
an open moor. You can do it or not, as you like : but 
if you wish to catch large trout on a bright day, I 
should advise you to employ the only method yet 
discovered. 

There — you are through ; and the keeper shall hand 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



you your rod. You have torn your trousers, and got 
a couple of thorns in your shins. The one can be 
mended, the other pulled out. Now, jump the feeder. 
There is no run to it, so — you have jumped in. Never 
mind : but keep the point of your rod up. You are 
at least saved the lingering torture of getting wet inch 
by inch ; and as for cold water hurting any one — Credat 
Judteus. 

Now make a circuit through the meadow forty yards 
away. Stoop down when you are on the ridge of 
each table. A trout may be basking at the lower end 
of the pool, who will see you, rush up, and tell all his 
neighbours. Take off that absurd black chimney-pot, 
which you are wearing, I suppose, for the same reason 
as Homer's heroes wore their koruthous and phalerous, 
to make yourself look taller and more terrible to your 
foes. Crawl up on three legs; and when you are in 
position, kneel down. So. 

Shorten your line all you can — you cannot fish with 
too short a line up-stream ; and throw, not into the 
oil-basin near you, but right up into the darkest corner. 
Make your fly strike the brickwork and drop in. — 
So ? No rise ? Then don't work or draw it, or your 
deceit is discovered instantly. Lift it out, and repeat 
the throw. 

What ? You have hooked your fly in the hatches ? 
Very good. Pull at it till the casting-line breaks ; put 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



on a fresh one, and to work again. There ! yon have 
him. Don't rise ! fight him kneeling ; hold him hard, 
and give him no line, but shorten up anyhow. Tear 
and haul him down to you before he can make to his 

home, while the keeper runs round with the net 

There, he is on shore. Two pounds, good weight. 
Creep back more cautiously than ever, and try again. 

There. A second fish, over a pound weight. 

Now we will go and recover the flies off the hatches ; 
and you will agree that there is more cunning, more 
science, and therefore more pleasant excitement, in 
' foxing ' a great fish out of a stop-hole, than in whip- 
ping far and wide over an open stream, where a half- 
pounder is a wonder and a triumph. As for physical 
exertion, you will be able to compute for yourself how 
much your back, knees, and fore-arm will ache by 
nine o'clock to-night, after some ten hours of this 
scrambling, splashing, leaping, and kneeling upon a 
hot June day. This item in the day's work will of 
course be put to the side of loss or of gain, according 
to your temperament : but it will cure you of an 
inclination to laugh at us Wessex chalk-fishers as 
Cockneys. 

So we will wander up the streams, taking a fish here 

and a fish there, till Eeally it is very hot. We 

have the whole day before us ; the fly will not be up 
till five o'clock at least ; and then the real fishing will 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



begin. Why tire ourselves beforehand ? The squire 
will send us luncheon in the afternoon, and after that 
expect us to fish as long as we can see, and come up 
to the hall to sleep, regardless of the ceremony of dress- 
ing. For is not the green drake on ? And while he 
reigns, all hours, meals, decencies, and respectabilities 
must yield to his caprice. See, here he sits, or rather 
tens of thousands of him, one on each stalk of grass — 
green drake, yellow drake, brown drake, white drake, 
each with his gauzy wings folded over his back, waiting 
for some unknown change of temperature, or something 
else, in the afternoon, to wake him from his sleep, and 
send him fluttering over the stream ; while overhead 
the black drake, who has changed his skin and repro- 
duced his species, dances in the sunshine, empty, hard, 
and happy, like Festus Bailey's Great Black Crow, who 
all his life sings ' Ho, ho, ho,' 

' For no one will eat him, he well doth know. ' 

However, as we have in sides, and he has actually 
none, and what is more strange, not even a mouth 
wherewith to fill the said insides, we had better copy 
his brothers and sisters below whose insides are still 
left, and settle with them upon the grass awhile beneath 
yon goodly elm. 

Comfort yourself with a glass of sherry and a biscuit, 
and give the keeper one, and likewise a cigar. He will 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



value it at five times its worth, not merely for the 
pleasure of it, but because it raises him iu the social 
scale. ' Any cad/ so he holds, ' smokes pipes ; but a 
good cigar is the mark of the quality,' and of them who 
' keep company with the quality,' as keepers do. He 
puts it in his hat-crown, to smoke this evening in 
presence of his compeers at the public-house, retires 
modestly ten yards, lies down on his back in a dry 
feeder, under the shade of the long grass, and in- 
stantly falls fast asleep. Poor fellow ! he was up all 
last night in the covers, and will be again to-night. 
Let him sleep while he may, and we will chat over 
chalk-fishing. 

The first thing, probably, on which you will be in- 
clined to ask questions, is the size of the fish in these 
streams. We have killed this morning four fish averag- 
ing a pound weight each. All below that weight we 
throw in, as is our rule here ; but you may have re- 
marked that none of them exceeded half a pound ; that 
they were almost all about herring size. The smaller 
ones I believe to be year-old fish, hatched last spring 
twelvemonth ; the pound fish two-year-olds. At what 
rate these last would have increased depends very much, 
I suspect, on their chance of food. The limit of life 
and growth in cold-blooded animals seems to depend 
very much on their amount of food. The boa, alligator, 
shark, pike, and I suppose the trout also, will live to a 



50 PROSE IDYLLS. 



great age, and attain an enormous size, give them but 
range enough ; and the only cause why there are trout 
of ten pounds and more in the Thames lashers, while 
one of four pounds is rare here, is simply that the 
Thames fish has more to eat. Here, were the fish not 
sufficiently thinned out every year by anglers, they 
would soon become large-headed, brown, and flabby, and 
cease to grow. Many a good stream has been spoilt in 
this way, when a squire has unwisely preferred quantity 
to quality of fish. 

And if it be not the quantity of feed, I know no 
clear reason why chalk and limestone trout should be 
so much larger and better flavoured than any others. 
The cause is not the greater swiftness of the streams ; 
for (paradoxical as it may seem to many) a trout likes 
swift water no more than a pike does, except when 
spawning or cleaning afterwards. At those times his 
blood seems to require a very rapid oxygenation, and 
he goes to the 'sharps' to obtain it: but when he is 
feeding and fattening, the water cannot be too still for 
him. Streams which are rapid throughout never pro- 
duce large fish ; and a hand-long trout transferred from 
his native torrent to a still pond, will increase in size 
at a ten times faster rate. In chalk streams the largest 
fish are found oftener in the mill-heads than in the mill- 
tails. It is a mistake, though a common one, to fancy 
that the giant trout of the Thames lashers lie in swift 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



water. On the contrary, they lie in the very stillest 
spot of the whole pool, which is just under the hatches. 
There the rush of the water shoots over their heads, 
and they look up through it for every eatable which 
may he swept down. At night they run down to the 
fan of the pool, to hunt minnow round the shallows ; 
but their home by day is the still deep ; and their pre- 
ference of the lasher pool to the quiet water above is 
due merely to the greater abundance of food. Chalk 
trout, then, are large not merely because the water 
is swift. 

Whether trout have not a specific fondness for lime ; 
whether water of some dozen degrees of hardness is not 
necessary for their development ? are questions which 
may be fairly asked. Yet is not the true reason this ; 
that the soil on the banks of a chalk or limestone 
stream is almost always rich — red loam, carrying an 
abundant vegetation, and therefore an abundant crop of 
animal life, both in and out of the water ? The count- 
less insects which haunt a rich hay meadow, all know 
who have eyes to see ; and if they will look into the 
stream they will find that the water-world is even richer 
than the air-world. 

Every still spot in a chalk stream becomes so choked 
with weed as to require moving at least thrice a year, 
to supply the mills with water. Grass, milfoil, water 
crowfoot, hornwort, starwort, horsetail, and a dozen 

E 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



other delicate plants, form one tangled forest, denser 
than those of the Amazon, and more densely peopled 
likewise. 

To this list will soon be added our Transatlantic 
curse, Bdbingtonia diabolica, alias Anacharis alsinas- 
trum. It has already ascended the Thames as high as 
Eeading ; and a few years more, owing to the present 
aqua-vivarium mania, will see it filling every mill-head 
in England, to the torment of all millers. Young ladies 
are assured that the only plant for their vivariums 
is a sprig of anacharis, for which they pay sixpence — 
the market value being that of a wasp, flea, or other 
scourge of the human race ; and when the vivarium 
fails, its contents, Anacharis and all, are tost into the 
nearest ditch ; for which the said young lady ought to 
be fined five pounds ; and would be, if Governments 
governed. What an ' if ' ! 

But come; for the sun burns bright, and fishing 
is impossible : lie down upon the bank, above this 
stop. There is a campshutting (a boarding in English) 
on which you can put your elbows. Lie down on your 
face, and look down through two or three feet of water 
clear as air into the water forest where the great 
trout feed. 

Here; look into this opening in the milfoil and 
crowfoot bed. Do you see a grey film around that 
sprig ? Examine it through the pocket lens. It is a 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 53 

forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They are 
Vorticelhe ; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary 
current on its rim, is scavenging the water — till a tad- 
pole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions 
of living creatures are there on that one sprig ? Look 
here ! — a brown polype, with long waving arms — a 
gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is 
Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I 
think by Trembley). Ere we go home I may show you 
perhaps Hydra viridis, with long pea-green arms ; and 
rosea, most beautiful in form and colour of all the 
strange family. You see that lump, just where his 
stalk joins his bell-head ? That is a budding baby. 
Ignorant of the joys and cares of wedlock, he increases 
by gemmation. See ! here is another, with a fall-sized 
young one growing on his back. You may tear it off 
if you will — he cares not. You may cut him into a 
dozen pieces, they say, and each one will grow, as 
a potato does. I suppose, however, that he also 
sends out of his mouth little free ova — medusoids — 
call them what you will, swimming by ciliee, which 
afterwards, unless the water beetles stop them on 
the way, will settle down as stalked polypes, and 
in their turn practise some mystery of Owenian 
parthenogenesis, or Steenstruppian alternation of gene- 
rations, in which all traditional distinctions of plant 
and animal, male and female, are laughed to scorn 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



by the magnificent fecundity of the Divine imagina- 
tions. 

That dusty cloud which shakes off in the water as 
you move the weed, under the microscope would be one 
mass of exquisite forms — Desmidise and Diatomacea?, 
and what not ? Instead of running over long names, 
take home a little in a bottle, put it under your 
microscope, and if you think good verify the species 
from Hassall, Ehrenberg, or other wise book ; but with- 
out doing that, one glance through the lens will show 
you why the chalk trout grow fat. 

Do they, then, eat these infusoria ? 

That is not clear. But minnows and small fry eat 
them by millions ; and so do tadpoles, and perhaps 
caddis baits and water crickets. 

What are they ? 

Look on the soft muddy bottom. You see number- 
less bits of stick. Watch awhile, and those sticks are 
alive, crawling and tumbling over each other. The 
weed, too, is full of smaller ones. Those live sticks 
are the larva-cases of the Caperers — Phryganeae — of 
which one family nearly two hundred species have been 
already found in Great Britain. Fish up one, and you 
find, amid sticks and pebbles, a comfortable silk case, 
tenanted by a goodly grub. Six legs he has, like all 
insects, and tufts of white horns on each ring of his 
abdomen, which are his gills. A goodly pair of jaws 



CEA LK-S THE A M ST UDIES. 



he has too, and does good service with them : for he 
is the great water scavenger. Decaying vegetable 
matter is his food, and with those jaws he w r ill bark a 
dead stick as neatly as you will with a penknife. But 
he does not refuse animal matter. A dead brother 
(his, not yours) makes a savoury meal for him ; and 
a party of those Vorticellse would stand a poor chance 
if he came across them. You may count these caddis 
baits by hundreds of thousands ; whether the trout eat 
them case and all, is a question in these streams. In 
some rivers the trout do so ; and what is curious, during 
the spring, have a regular gizzard, a temporary thick- 
ening of the coats of the stomach, to enable them to 
grind the pebbly cases of the caddises. See! here is 
one wdiose house is closed at both ends — 'grille,' as 
Pictet calls it, in his unrivalled monograph of the 
Genevese Phryganere, on which he spent four years of 
untiring labour. The grub has stopped the mouth of 
his case by an open network of silk, defended by small 
pebbles, through which the water may pass freely, 
while he changes into his nymph state. Open the 
case ; you find within not a grub, but a strange bird- 
beaked creature, with long legs and horns laid flat by 
its sides, and miniature wings on its back. Observe 
that the sides of the tail, and one pair of legs, are 
fringed with dark hairs. After a fortnight's rest in 
this prison this ' nymph ' will gnaw her way out and 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



swim through the water on her back, by means of that 
fringed tail and paddles, till she reaches the bank and 
the upper air. There, under the genial light of day, 
her skin will burst, and a four- winged fly emerge, to ■ 
buzz over the water as a fawn-coloured Caperer — dead- 
liest of trout flies ; if she be not snapped up beforehand 
under water by some spotted monarch in search of 
supper. 

But look again among this tangled mass of weed. 
Here are more larvae of water-flies. Some have the 
sides fringed with what look like paddles, but are 
gills. Of these one part have whisks at the tail, and 
swim freely. They will change into ephemerae, cock- 
winged c duns,' with long whisked tails. The larvae of the 
famous green drake {Ephemera vulgata) are like these : 
but we shall not find them. They are all changed by 
now into the perfect fly ; and if not, they burrow about 
the banks, and haunt the crayfish-holes, and are not 
easily found. 

Some, again, have the gills on their sides larger and 
broader, and no whisks at the tail. These are the larvae 
of Sialis, the black alder, Lord Sto well's fly, shorm fly, 
hunch-back of the Welsh, with which we have caught 
our best fish to-day. 

And here is one of a delicate yellow-green, whose 
tail is furnished with three broad paddle-blades. These, 
I believe, are gills again. The larva is probably that 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



of the Yellow Sally — Chrysopcrla viridis — a famous fly 
on hot days in May and June. Among the pebbles 
there, below the fall, we should have found, a month 
since, a similar but much larger grub, with two 
paddles at his tail. He is the ' creeper ' of the 
northern streams, and changes to the great crawling 
stone fly (May-fly of Tweed), Perla bicaudata, an ugly 
creature, which runs on stones and posts, and kills 
right well on stormy days, when he is beaten into the 
stream. 

There. Now we have the larvae of the four great 
trout-fly families, Phryganese, Ephemeras, Sialiche, 
Perlidre ; so you have no excuse for telling — as 
not only Cockneys, but really good sportsmen who 
write on fishing, have done — such fibs as that 
the green drake comes out of a caddis-bait, or giving 
such vague generalities as, ' this fly comes from a 
water-larva.' 

These are, surely, in their imperfect and perfect 
states, food enough to fatten many a good trout : but 
they are not all. See these transparent brown snails, 
Limneee and Succinse, climbing about the posts ; and 
these other pretty ones, coil laid within coil as flat as 
a shilling, Planorbis. Many a million of these do the 
trout pick off the weed day by day; and no food, not 
even the leech, which swarms here, is more fattening. 
The finest trout of the high Snowdon lakes feed almost 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



entirely on leech and snail — baits they have none — and 
fatten till they cut as red as a salmon. 

Look here too, once more. You see a grey moving 
cloud about that pebble bed, and underneath that bank. 
It is a countless swarm of ' sug,' or water-shrimp ; a bad 
food, but devoured greedily by the great trout in certain 
overstocked preserves. 

Add to these plenty of minnow, stone-loach, and 
miller's thumbs, a second course of young crayfish, and 
for one gormandizing week of bliss, thousands of the 
great green-drake fly : and you have food enough for 
a stock of trout which surprise, by their size and num- 
ber, an angler fresh from the mountain districts of 
the north and west. To such a fisherman, the tale of 
Mr. * * * of Eamsbury, who is said to have killed in 
one day in his own streams on Kennet, seventy-six 
trout, all above a pound, sounds like a traveller's 
imagination : yet the fact is, I believe, accurately 
true. 

This, however, is an extraordinary case upon an ex- 
traordinary stream. In general, if a man shall bring- 
home (beside small fish) a couple of brace of from one 
to three pounds apiece, he may consider himself as a 
happy man, and that the heavens have not shone, but 
frowned, upon him very propitiously. 

And now comes another and an important question. 
For which of all these dainty eatables, if for any, do 



CHALK-HTUKA M ST UDIES. 



the trout take our flies ? and from that arises another. 
Why are the flies with which we have been fishing 
this morning so large — of the size which is usually 
employed on a Scotch lake ? You are a North-country 
fisher, and are wont, upon your clear streams, to fish 
with nothing but the smallest gnats. And yet our 
streams are as clear as yours : what can be clearer ? 

Whether fish really mistake our artificial flies for 
different species of natural ones, as Englishmen hold ; 
or merely for something good to eat, the colour whereof 
strikes their fancy, as Scotchmen think — a theory which 
has been stated in detail, and with great semblance of 
truth, in Mr. Stewart's admirable ' Practical Angler,' — is 
a matter about which much good sense has been written 
on both sides. 

Whosoever will, may find the great controversy fully 
discussed in the pages of Ephemera. Perhaps (as in 
most cases) the truth lies between the two extremes ; at 
least, in a chalk-stream. 

Ephemera's list of flies may be very excellent, but it 
is about ten times as long as would be required for any 
of our southern streams. Six or seven sort of flies 
ought to suffice for any fisherman ; if they will not kill, 
the thing which will kill is yet to seek. 

To name them : — 

1. The caperer. 

2. The March-brown. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



3. The governor. 

4. The black alder. 

And two or three large palmers, red, grizzled, and 
coch-a-bonddhu, each with a tuft of red floss silk at 
the tail. These are enough to show sport from March 
to October ; and also like enough to certain natural flies 
to satisfy the somewhat dull memory of a trout. 

But beyond this list there is little use in roaming, as 
far as my experience goes. A yellow dun kills some- 
times marvellously on chalk-streams, and always upon 
rocky ones. A Turkey-brown ephemera, the wing made 
of the bright brown tail of the cock partridge, will, 
even just after the May-fly is off, show good sport in 
the forenoon, when he is on the water ; and so will in 
the evening the claret spinner, to which he turns. 
Excellent patterns of these flies may be found in 
Eonalds : but, after all, they are uncertain flies ; and, 
as Harry Verney used to say, ' they casualty flies be all 
havers ; ' which sentence the reader, if he understands 
good Wessex, can doubtless translate for himself. 

And there are evenings on which the fish take greedily 
small transparent ephemerae. But, did you ever see 
large fish rise at these ephemerae ? And even if you did, 
can you imitate the natural fly ? And after all, would 
it not be waste of time ? For the experience of many 
good fishers is, that trout rise at these delicate duns, 
black gnats, and other microscopic trash, simply faute 



CHALK-STUB. -I M STUDIES. 



de micux. They are hungry, as trout are six clays in 
the week, just at sunset. A supper they must have, 
and they take what conies ; but if you can give them 
anything better than the minute fairy, compact of equal 
parts of glass and wind, which naturalists call an Ephe- 
mera or Bsetis, it will be most thankfully received, if 
there be ripple enough on the water (which there sel- 
dom is on a fine evening) to hide the line : and even 
though the water be still, take boldly your caperer or 
your white moth (either of them ten times as large as 
what the trout are rising at), hurl it boldly into a likely 
place, and let it lie quiet and sink, not attempting to 
draw or work it ; and if you do not catch anything by 
that means, comfort yourself with the thought that 
there are others who can. 

And now to go through our list, beginning with — 

1. The caperer. 

This perhaps is the best of all flies ; it is certainly the 
one which will kill earliest and latest in the year ; and 
though I would hardly go as far as a friend of mine, who 
boasts of never fishing with anything else, I believe it 
will, from March to October, take more trout, and possibly 
more grayling, than any other fly. Its basis is the 
woodcock wing ; red hackle legs, which should be long 
and pale ; and a thin mohair body, of different shades 
of red-brown, from a dark claret to a pale sandy. It 
may thus, tied of different sizes, do duty for half- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



a-dozen of the commonest flies ; for the early claret 
(red-brown of Eonalds ; a Nemoura, according to him), 
which is the first spring-fly ; for the red spinner, or 
perfect form of the March-brown ephemera ; for the 
soldier, the soft- winged reddish beetle which haunts the 
umbelliferous flowers, and being as soft in spirit as 
in flesh, perpetually falls into the water, and comes 
to grief therein; and last but not least, for the true 
caperers, or whole tribe of Phryganidse, of which a 
sketch was given just now. As a copy of them, the 
body should be of a pale red brown, all but sandy (but 
never snuff-coloured, as shop-girls often tie it), and its 
best hour is always in the evening. Tt kills well when 
fish are gorged with their morning meal of green 
drakes; and after the green drake is off, it is almost 
the only fly at which large trout care to look ; a fact 
not to be wondered at when one considers that nearly 
two hundred species of English Phryganidse have been 
already described, and that at least half of them are 
of the fawn-tint of the caperer. Under the title of 
flame-brown, cinnamon, or red-hackle and rail's wing, 
a similar fly kills well in Ireland, and in Scotland 
also; and is sometimes the best sea-trout fly which 
can be laid on the water. Let this suffice for the 
caperer. 

2. Of the March-brown ephemera there is little to 
be said, save to notice Eonalds' and Ephemera's excel- 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



lent description, and Ephemera's good hint of fishing 
with more than one March-brown at once, viz. with a 
sandy-bodied male, and a greenish-bodied female. The 
fly is a worthy fly, and being easily imitated, gives 
great sport, in number rather than in size ; for when the 
March-brown is out, the two or three pound fish are 
seldom on the move, preferring leeches, tom-toddies, 
and caddis-bait in the nether deeps, to slim ephemerae 
at the top ; and if you should (as you may) get hold of 
a big fish on the fly, 'you'd best hit him in again,' as 
we say in Wessex; for he will be, like the Ancient 
Mariner — 

' Long, and lank, and brown, 
As is the ribbed sea-sand.' 

3. The ' governor.' — In most sandy banks, and dry 
poor lawns, will be found numberless burrows of ground 
bees who have a great trick of tumbling into the water. 
Perhaps, like the honey bee, they are thirsty souls, and 
must needs go down to the river and drink ; perhaps, 
like the honey bee, they rise into the air with some 
difficulty, and so in crossing a stream are apt to strike 
the further bank, and fall in. Be that as it may, an 
imitation of these little ground bees is a deadly fly the 
whole year round ; and if worked within six inches of 
the shore, will sometimes fill a basket when there is 
not a fly on the water or a fish rising. There are those 
who never put up a cast of flies without one ; and 



64 PROSE IDYLLS. 



those, too, who have killed large salmon on him in the 
north of Scotland, when the streams are low. 

His tie is simple enough. A pale partridge or wood- 
cock wing, short red hackle legs, a peacock-herl body, 
and a tail — on which too much artistic skill can hardly 
be expended — of yellow floss silk, and gold twist or 
tinsel. The orange-tailed governors ' of ye shops/ as 
the old drug-books would say, are all ' havers ;■ for the 
proper colour is a honey yellow. The mystery of this 
all- conquering tail seems to be, that it represents the 
yellow pollen, or ' bee bread ' in the thighs or abdomen 
of the bee ; whereof the bright colour, and perhaps 
the strong musky flavour, makes him an attractive and 
savoury morsel. Be that as it may, there is no better 
rule for a chalk stream than this — when you don't 
know what to fish with, try the governor. 

4. The black alder (Sialis nigra, or Lutaria). 

What shall be said, or not be said, of this queen of 
flies ? And what of Ephemera, who never mentions 
her ? His alder fly is — I know not what ; certainly 
not that black alder, shorm fly, Lord Stowell's fly, or 
hunchback, which kills the monsters of the deep, sur- 
passed only by the green drake for one fort-night ; but 
surpassing him in this, that she will kill on till Sep- 
tember, from that happy day on which 



' You find her out on every stalk 
Whene'er you take a river walk, 
When swifts at eve begin to hawk.' 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 65 

thou beloved member of the brute creation ! 
Songs have been written in praise of thee ; statues 
would ere now have been erected to thee, had that 
hunch back and those flabby wings of thine been 
' susceptible of artistic treatment.' But ugly thou art 
in the eyes of the uninitiated vulgar ; a little stumpy 
old maid toddling about the world in a black bonnet 
and a brown cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, but 
doing good wherever thou comest, and leaving sweet 
memories behind thee ; so sweet that the trout will rise 
at the ghost or sham of thee, for pure love of thy past 
kindnesses to them, months after thou hast departed 
from this sublunary sphere. What hours of bliss do I 
not owe to thee ! How have I seen, in the rich meads 
of Wey, after picking out wretched quarter-pounders all 
the morning on March-brown and red-hackle, the great 
trout rush from every hover to welcome thy first ap- 
pearance among the sedges and buttercups ! How often, 
late in August, on Thames, on Test, on Loddon heads, 
have I seen the three and four pound fish prefer thy 
dead image to any live reality. Have I not seen poor 
old Si. Wilder, king of Thames fishermen (now gone 
home to his rest), shaking his huge sides with delight 
over thy mighty deeds, as his fourteen-inch whiskers 
fluttered in the breeze like the horse-tail standard of 
some great Bashaw, while crystal Thames murmured 
over the white flints on Monkey Island shallow, and 

K F 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the soft breeze sighed in the colossal poplar spires, and 
the great trout rose and rose, and would not cease, at 
thee, my alder-fly ? Have I not seen, after a day in 
which the earth below was iron, and the heavens above 
as brass, as the three-pounders would have thee, and 
thee alone, in the purple August dusk, old Moody's 
red face grow redder with excitement, half proud at 
having advised me to ' put on ' thee, half fearful lest we 
should catch all my lady's pet trout in one evening ? 
Beloved alder-fly ! would that I could give thee a soul 
(if indeed thou hast not one already, thou, and all 
things which live), and make thee happy in all seons to 
come ! But as it is, such immortality as I can I bestow 
on thee here, in small return for all the pleasant days 
thou hast bestowed on me. 

Bah ! I am becoming poetical ; let us think how to tie 
an alder-fly. 

The common tie is good enough. A brown mallard, 
or dark hen-pheasant tail for wing, a black hackle for 
legs, and the necessary peacock-herl body. A better 
still is that of Jones Jones Beddgelert, the famous fish- 
ing clerk of Snowdonia, who makes the wing of dap- 
pled peacock-hen, and puts the black hackle on before 
the wings, in order to give the peculiar hunch-backed 
shape of the natural fly. Many a good fish has this 
tie killed. But the best pattern of all is tied from the 
mottled wing -feather of an Indian bustard ; generally 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 67 

used, when it can "be obtained, only for salmon flies. 
The brown and fawn check pattern of this feather 
seems to be peculiarly tempting to trout, especially to 
the large trout of Thames ; and in every river where I 
have tried the alder, I have found the bustard wing 
facile princeps among all patterns of the fly. 

Of palmers (the hairy caterpillars) are many sorts. 
Ephemera gives by far the best list yet published. 
Eonalds has also three good ones, but whether they are 
really taken by trout instead of the particular natural 
insects which he mentions, is not very certain. The 
little coch-a-bonddhu palmer, so killing upon moor 
streams, may probably be taken for young larvae of the 
fox and oak-egger moths, abundant on all moors, upon 
trefoils, and other common plants ; but the lowland 
caterpillars are so abundant and so various in colour 
that trout must be good entomologists to distinguish 
them. Some distinction they certainly make ; for one 
palmer will kill where another does not : but this de- 
pends a good deal on the colour of the water ; the red 
palmer, being easily seen, will kill almost anywhere and 
any when, simply because it is easily seen ; and both 
the grizzle and brown palmer may be made to kill by 
adding to the tail a tuft of red floss silk; for red, it 
would seem, has the same exciting effect on fish which 
it has upon many quadrupeds, possibly because it is the 
colour of flesh. The mackerel will often run greedily 

f 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



at a strip of scarlet cloth ; and the most killing pike-fly 
I ever used had a body made of remnants of the hunts- 
man's new ' pink.' Still, there are local palmers. On 
Thames, for instance, I have seldom failed with the 
grizzled palmer, while the brown has seldom succeeded, 
and the usually infallible red never. There is one more 
palmer worth trying, which Scotsmen, I believe, call the 
Eoyal Charlie ; a coch-a-bonddhu or furnace hackle, over 
a body of gold-coloured floss silk, ribbed with broad gold 
tinsel. Both in Devonshire and in Hampshire this will 
kill great quantities of fish, wherever furzy or otherwise 
wild banks or oak-woods afford food for the oak-egger 
and fox moths, which children call ' Devil's Gold Kings,' 
and Scotsmen ' Hairy Oubits.' 

Two hints more about palmers. They must not be 
worked on the top of the water, but used as stretchers, 
and allowed to sink as living caterpillars do ; and next, 
they can hardly be too large or rough, provided that 
you have skill enough to get them into the water with- 
out a splash. I have killed well on Thames with one 
full three inches long, armed of course with two small 
hooks. With palmers — and perhaps with all baits — 
the rule is, the bigger the bait the bigger the fish. A 
large fish does not care to move except for a good 
mouthful. The best pike-fisher I know prefers a half- 
pound chub when he goes after one of his fifteen-pound 
jack ; and the largest pike I ever ran — and lost, alas ! — 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



who seemed of any weight above twenty pounds, was 
hooked on a live white fish of full three-quarters of a 
pound. Still, no good angler will despise the minute 
North-country flies. In Yorkshire they are said to kill 
the large chalk trout of Driffield as well as the small 
limestone and grit fish of Craven ; if so, the gentlemen 
of the Driffield Club, who are said to think nothing of 
killing three-pound fish on midge flies and cobweb 
tackle, must be (as canny Yorkshiremen are likely 
enough to be) the best anglers in England. 

In one spot only in Yorkshire, as far as I know, do 
our large chalk flies kill : namely, in the lofty limestone 
tarn of Malham. There palmers, caperers, and rough 
black flies, of the largest Thames and Kennet sizes, 
seem the only attractive baits : and for this reason, that 
they are the flies of the place. The cinnamon Phry- 
ganea comes up abundantly from among the stones ; 
and the large peat moss to the west of the tarn abounds, 
as usual, in house-flies and bluebottles, and in the 
caterpillars of the fox and oak-egger moths : another 
proof that the most attractive flies are imitations of the 
real insects. On the other hand, there are said to be 
times when midges, and nothing else, will rise fish on 
seme chalk streams. The delicate black hackle which 
Mr. Stewart praises so highly (and which should always 
be tied on a square sneck-bend hook) will kill in June 
and July ; and on the Itchen, at Winchester, hardly any 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



flies but small ones are used after the green drake is off. 
But there is one sad objection against these said midges 
— what becomes of your fish when hooked on one in 
a stream full of weeds (as all chalk streams are after 
June), save 

' One struggle more, and I am free 
From pangs which rend my heart in twain ' ? 

Winchester fishers have confessed to me that they 
lose three good fish out of every four in such cases ; 
and as it seems pretty clear that chalk fish approve 
of no medium between very large flies and very small 
ones, I advise the young angler, whose temper is not 
yet schooled into perfect resignation, to spare his own 
feelings by fishing with a single large fly — say the 
governor in the forenoon, the caperer in the evening, 
regardless of the clearness of the water. I have seen 
flies large enough for April, raise fish excellently in 
Test and other clear streams in July and August ; and, 
what is more, drag them up out of the weeds and into 
the landing-net, where midges would have lost them in 
the first scuffle. 

So much for our leading chalk flies ; all copies 
of live insects. Of the entomology of mountain 
streams little as yet is known : but a few scattered 
hints may suffice to show that in them, as well as in 
the chalk rivers, a little natural science might help 
the angler. 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



The well-known fact that smaller flies are required 
on the moors than in the lowlands, is easily explained 
by the fact that poorer soils and swifter streams pro- 
duce smaller insects. The large Phryganese, or true 
caperers, whose caddis-baits love still pools and stag- 
nant ditches, are there rare ; and the office of water- 
scavenger is fulfilled by the Ehyacophiles (torrent- 
lovers) and Hydropsyches, whose tiny pebble-houses are 
fixed to the stones to resist the violence of the summer 
floods. In and out of them the tiny larva runs to find 
food, making in addition, in some species, galleries of 
earth along the surface of the stones, in which he takes 
his walks abroad in full security. In any of the brown 
rivulets of Windsor forest, towards the middle of summer, 
the pebble-houses of these little creatures may be seen in 
millions, studding every stone. To the Hydropsyches 
(species moiUana ? or variegata ? of Pictet) belongs that 
curious little Welsh fly, known in Snowdon by the 
name of the Gwynnant, whose tesselated wing is best 
imitated by brown mallard feather, and who so swarms 
in the lower lakes of Snowdon, that it is often necessary 
to use three of them on the line at once, all other flies 
being useless. It is perhaps the abundance of these 
tesselated Hydropsyches which makes the mallard wing 
the most useful in mountain districts, as the abundance 
of the fawn and grey Phryganidse in the south of Eng- 
land makes the woodcock wing justly the favourite. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



The Bhyacophiles, on the other hand, are mostly of a 
shining soot-grey, or almost black. These may be seen 
buzzing in hundreds over the pools on a wet evening, 
and with them the sooty Mystacides, called silver- 
horns in Scotland, from their antennae, which are of 
preposterous length, and ringed prettily enough with 
black and white. These delicate fairies make move- 
able cases, or rather pipes, of the finest sand, generally 
curved, and resembling in shape the Dentalium shell. 
Guarded by these, they hang in myriads on the smooth 
ledges of rock, where the water runs gently a few 
inches deep. These are abundant everywhere : but I 
never saw so many of them as in the exquisite Cother 
brook, near Middleham, in Yorkshire. In that delicious 
glen, while wading up beneath the ash-fringed crags of 
limestone, out of which the great ring ouzel (too wild, it 
seemed, to be afraid of man) hopped down fearlessly to 
feed upon the strand, or past flower-banks where the 
golden globe-fiower, and the great blue geranium, and 
the giant campanula bloomed beneath the white tassels 
of the bird-cherry, I could not tread upon the limestone 
slabs without crushing at every step hundreds of the 
delicate Mystacide tubes, which literally paved the 
shallow edge of the stream, and which would have been 
metamorphosed in due time into small sooty moth-like 
fairies, best represented, I should say, by the soft black- 
hackle which Mr. Stewart recommends as the most 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



deadly of North-country flies. Not to these, however, 
but to the Phryganese (who, when sticks and pebbles 
fail, often make their tubes of sand, e.g. P. fiava), 
should I refer the red-cow fly, which is almost the only 
autumn killer in the Dartmoor streams. A red cow- 
hair body and a woodcock wing is his type, and let 
those who want West-country trout remember him. 

Another fly, common on some rocky streams, but 
more scarce in the chalk, is the ' Yellow Sally,' which 
entomologists, with truer appreciation of its colour, call 
Chrysoperla viriclis. It may be bought at the shops ; 
at least a yellow something of that name, but bearing 
no more resemblance to the delicate yellow-green 
natural fly, with its warm grey wings, than a Pre- 
Eaphaelite portrait to the human being for whom it is 
meant. Copied, like most trout flies, from some tra- 
ditional copy by the hands of Cockney maidens, who 
never saw a fly in their lives, the mistake of a mistake, 
a sham raised to its tenth power, it stands a signal 
proof that anglers will never get good flies till they 
learn a little entomology themselves, and then teach it 
to the tackle makers. But if it cannot be bought, 
it can at least be made ; and I should advise every- 
one who fishes rocky streams in May and June, to 
dye for himself some hackles of a brilliant greenish- 
yellow, and in the most burning sunshine, when fish 
seem inclined to rise at no fly whatsoever, examine 



74 PROSE IDYLLS. 



the boulders for the Chrysoperla, who runs over them, 
her wings laid flat on her back, her yellow legs moving 
as rapidly as a forest-fly's ; try to imitate her, and use 
her on the stream, or on the nearest lake. Certain it 
is that in Snowdon this fly and the Gwynnant Hydro- 
psyche will fill a creel in the most burning north-easter, 
when all other flies are useless ; a sufficient disproof of 
the Scotch theory — that fish do not prefer the fly which 
is on the water. 1 

Another disproof may be found in the 'fern web,' 
' bracken clock ' of Scotland j the tiny cockchafer, 
with brown wing-cases and dark-green thorax, which 
abounds in some years in the hay-meadows, on the 
fern, or on the heads of umbelliferous flowers. The 
famous Loch- Awe fly, described as an alder-fly with a 
rail's wing, seems to be nothing but this fat little 
worthy : but the best plan is to make the wings, either 
buzz or hackle, of the bright neck-feather of the cock 
pheasant, thus gaining the metallic lustre of the beetle 
tribe. Tied thus, either in Devonshire or Snowdon, 
few flies surpass him when he is out. His fatness 
proves an attraction which the largest fish cannot 
resist. 

The Ephemerae, too, are far more important in 

1 The Ripon list of natural flies contains several other species of 
small N"emouridee unknown to me, save one brown one, which is seen 
in the South, though rarely, in June. 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



rapid and rocky streams than in the deeper, stiller 
waters of the south. It is worth while for a good 
fish to rise at them there; the more luxurious chalk 
trout will seldom waste himself upon them, unless he 
be lying in shallow water, and has but to move a few 
inches upward. 

But these Ephemerae, like all other naiads, want 
working out. The species which Mr. Eonalds gives, 
are most of them, by his own confession, very uncertain. 
Of the Phryganidae he seems to know little or nothing, 
mentioning but two species out of the two hundred 
which are said to inhabit Britain ; and his land flies and 
beetles are in several cases quite wrongly named. How- 
ever, the professed entomologists know but little of the 
mountain flies ; and the angler who would help to work 
them out would confer a benefit on science, as well as 
on the 'gentle craft.' As yet the only approach to 
such a good work which I know of, is a little book on 
the trout flies of Eipon, with excellent engravings of 
the natural fly. The author's name is not given ; but 
the book may be got at Eipon, and most valuable it 
must be to any North-country fisherman. 

But come, we must not waste our time in talk, for 
here is a cloud over the sun, and plenty more coming 
up behind, before a ruffling south-west breeze, as Shelley 
has it — 

• Calling white clouds like flocks to feed in air.' 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



Let us up aud onward to that long still reach, 
which is now curling up fast before the breeze ; there 
are large fish to be taken, one or two at least, even 
before the fly conies on. You need not change your 
flies ; the cast which you have on — governor, and black 
alder — will take, if anything will. Only do not waste 
your time and muscle, as you are beginning to do, by 
hurling your flies wildly into the middle of the stream, 
on the chance of a fish being there. Fish are there, 
no doubt, but not feeding ones. They are sailing 
about and enjoying the warmth ; but nothing more. 
If you want to find the hungry fish and to kill them, 
you must stand well back from the bank — or kneel 
down, if you are really in earnest about sport; and 
throw within a foot of the shore, above you or below 
(but if possible above), with a line short enough to 
manage easily ; by which I mean short enough to 
enable you to lift your flies out of the water at each 
throw without hooking them in the docks and comfrey 
which grow along the brink. You must learn to raise 
your hand at the end of each throw, and lift the flies 
clean over the land- weeds : or you will lose time, and 
frighten all the fish, by crawling to the bank to unhook 
them. Believe me, one of the commonest mistakes into 
which young anglers fall is that of fishing in ' skip- 
jack broad;' in plain English, in mid-stream, where 
few fish, and those little ones, are to be caught. Those 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



who wish for large fish work close under the banks, and 
seldom take a mid-stream cast, unless they see a fish 
rise there. 

The reason of this is simple. "Walking up the 
Strand in search of a dinner, a reasonable man will 
keep to the trottoir, and look in at the windows close 
to him, instead of parading up . the mid-street. And 
even so do all wise and ancient trout. The banks 
are their shops ; and thither they go for their dinners, 
driving their poor little children tyrannously out into 
the mid-river to fare as hap may hap. Over these 
children the tyro wastes his time, flogging the stream 
across and across for weary hours, while the big papas 
and mammas are comfortably under the bank, close at 
his feet, grubbing about the sides for water crickets, 
and not refusing at times a leech or a young crayfish, 
but perfectly ready to take a fly if you offer one large 
and tempting enough. They do but act on experience. 
All the largest surface-food — beetles, bees, and palmers 
— comes off the shore ; and all the caperers and alders, 
after emerging from their pupa-cases, swim to the 
shore in order to change into the perfect insect in the 
open air. The perfect insects haunt sunny sedges and 
tree-stems — whence the one is often called the sedge, 
the other the alder-fly — and from thence drop into the 
trouts' mouths ; and within six inches of the bank 
will the good angler work, all the more sedulously and 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



even hopefully if lie sees no fish rising. I have known 
good men say that they had rather not see fish on the 
rise, if the day be good ; that they can get surer sport, 
and are less troubled with small fish, by making them 
rise; and certain it is, that a day when the fish are 
rising all over the stream is generally one of disap- 
pointment. 

Another advantage of bank fishing is, that the fish 
sees the fly only for a moment. He has no long gaze 
at it, as it comes to him across the water. It either 
drops exactly over his nose, or sweeps down the stream 
straight upon him. He expects it to escape on shore 
the next moment, and chops at it fiercely and hastily, 
instead of following and examining. Add to this the 
fact that when he is under the bank there is far less 
chance of his seeing you ; and duly considering these 
things, you will throw away no more time in drawing, 
at least in chalk-streams, flies over the watery wastes, 
to be snapped at now and then by herring-sized pin- 
keens. In rocky streams, where the quantity of bank 
food is far smaller, this rule will perhaps not hold good ; 
though who knows not that his best fish are generally 
taken under some tree from which the little caterpillars, 
having determined on slow and deliberate suicide, 
are letting themselves down gently by a silken thread 
into the mouth of the spotted monarch, who has but 
to sail about and about, and pick them up one by 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



one as they touch the stream ? — A sight which makes 
one think — as does a herd of swine crunching acorns, 
each one of which might have become a 'builder 
oak ' — how Nature is never more magnificent than in 
her waste. 

The next mistake, natural enough to the laziness of 
fallen man, is that of fishing down-stream, and not up. 
What Mr. Stewart says on this point should be read 
by every tyro. By fishing up-stream, even against the 
wind, he will on an average kill twice as many trout 
as when fishing down. If trout are out and feeding 
on the shallows, up or down will simply make the 
difference of fish or no fish ; and even in deeps, where 
the difference in the chance of not being seen is not so 
great, many more fish will be hooked by the man who 
fishes up-stream, simply because when he strikes he 
pulls the hook into the trout's mouth instead of out of 
it. But he who would obey Mr. Stewart in fishing 
up-stream must obey him also in discarding his light 
London rod, which is in three cases out of four 
as weak and ' floppy ' in the middle as a waggon 
whip, and get to himself a stiff and powerful 
rod, strong enough to spin a minnow ; whereby 
he will obtain, after some weeks of aching muscles, 
two good things — a fore-arm fit for a sculptor's 
model, and trout hooked and killed, instead of pricked 
and lost. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Killed, as well as hooked ; for how large trout are 
to be killed in a weedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod 
which will take them down, is a question yet unsolved. 
Even the merest Cockney will know, if he thinks, that 
weeds float with their points down-stream; and that 
therefore if a fish is to be brought through them with- 
out entangling, he must be ' combed ' through them in 
the same direction. But how is this to be done, if a 
fish be hooked below you on a weak rod? With a 
strong rod indeed you can, at the chance of tearing out 
the hook, keep him by main force on the top of the 
water, till you have run past him and below him, 
shortening your line anyhow in loops — there is no 
time to wind it up with the reel— and then do what 
you might have done comfortably at first had you 
been fishing up — viz., bring him down-stream, and let 
the water run through his gills, and drown him. But 
with a weak rod — Alas for the tyro ! He catches 
one glimpse of a silver side plunging into the depths ; 
he finds his rod double in his hand ; he finds fish and 
flies stop suddenly somewhere ; he rushes down to the 
spot, sees weeds waving around his line, and guesses 
from what he feels and sees that the fish is grubbing 
up-stream through them, five feet - under water. He 
tugs downwards and backwards, but too l$te ; the drop- 
fly is fast wrapt in Ceratophyllum and Glyceria, Calli- 
triche and Potamogeton, and half-a-dozen more horrid 



j 



CHA LK-STR EA M STUDIES. 



things with long names and longer stems ; and what 
remains but the fate of Campbell's Lord Ullin ? — 

' The waters wild went o'er his child, 
And he was left lamenting.' 

Unless, in fact, large fish can be got rapidly down- 
stream, the chance of killing them is very small ; and 
therefore the man who fishes a willow- fringed brook 
downward, is worthy of no crown but Ophelia's, besides 
being likely enough, if he attempt to get down to his 
fish, to share her fate. The best fisherman, however, 
will come to shame in streams bordered by pollard 
willows, and among queer nooks, which can be only 
fished down-stream. I saw, but the other day, a fish 
hooked cleverly enough, by throwing to an inch where 
he ought to have been, and indeed was, and from the 
only point whence the throw could be made. Out of 
the water he came, head and tail, the moment he felt 
the hook, and showed a fair side over two pounds 
weight .... and then ? Instead of running away, he 
ran right at the fisherman, for reasons which were but 
too patent. Between man and fish were ten yards of 
shallow, then a deep weedy shelf, and then the hole 
which was his house. And for that weedy shelf the 
spotted monarch made, knowing that there he could 
drag himself clear of the fly, as perhaps he had done 
more than once before. 

K G 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



What was to be done? Take him down-stream 
through the weed? Alas, on the man's left hand an 
old pollard leant into the water, barring all downward 
movement. Jump in and run round ? He had rather 
to run back from the bank, from fear of a loose line ; 
the fish was coming at him so fast that there was no 
time to wind up. Safe into the weeds hurls the fish ; 
the man, as soon as he finds the fish stop, jumps in 
mid-leg deep, and staggers up to him, in hopes of 
clearing ; finds the dropper fast in the weeds, and the 
stretcher, which had been in the fish's mouth, wantoning 
somewhere in the depths — Quid plura ? Let us draw a 
veil over that man's return to shore. 

No mortal skill could have killed that fish. Mortal 
luck (which is sometimes, as most statesmen know, 
very great) might have done it, if the fish had been 
irretrievably fast hooked ; as, per contra, I once saw a 
fish of nearly four pounds hooked just above an alder 
bush, on the same bank as the angler. The stream was 
swift : there was a great weed-bed above ; the man 
had but about ten feet square of swift water to kill the 
trout in. Not a foot down-stream could he take him ; 
in fact, he had to pull him hard up-stream to keep him 
out of his hover in the alder roots. Three times that 
fish leapt into the air nearly a yard high ; and yet, so 
merciful is luck, and so firmly was he hooked, in five 
breathless minutes he was in the landing-net* 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



and when lie was there and safe ashore, just of the 
shape and colour of a silver spoon, his captor lay- 
down panting upon the bank, and with Sir Hugh Evans, 
manifested 'a great disposition to cry.' But it was a 
beautiful sight. A sharper round between man and fish 
never saw I fought in Merry England. 

I saw once, however, a cleverer, though not a more 
dashing feat. A handy little fellow (I wonder where 
he is now ?) hooked a trout of nearly three pounds 
with his dropper, and at the same moment a post with 
his stretcher. "What was to be done? To keep the 
fish pulling on him, and not on the post. And that, 
being favoured by standing on a four-foot bank, he did 
so well that he tired out the fish in some six feet 
square of water, stopping him and turning him beauti- 
fully whenever he tried to run, till I could get in to 
him with the landing-net. That was five-and-thirty 
years since. If the little man has progressed in his 
fishing as he ought, he should be now one of the finest 
anglers in England. 

***** 

So. Thanks to bank fishing, we have, you see, 
landed three or four more good fish in the last two 
hours — And ! What is here ? An ugly two-pound 
chub, Chevin, 'Echevin,' or Alderman, as the French 
call him. How is this, keeper ? I thought you allowed 
no such vermin in this water ? 

g 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



The keeper answers, with a grunt, that ' they allow 
themselves. That there always were chub hereabouts, 
and always will be ; for the more he takes out with the 
net, the more come next day.' 

Probably. No nets will exterminate these spawn- 
eating, fry-eating, all-eating pests, who devour the 
little trout, and starve the large ones, and, at the first 
sign of the net, ily to hover among the most tangled 
roots. There the) lie, as close as rats in a bank, and 
work themselves the farther in the more they are 
splashed and poked by the poles of the beaters. But 
the fly, well used, will — if not exterminate them — still 
thin them down greatly ; and very good sport they 
give, in my opinion, in spite of the contempt in which 
they are commonly held, as chicken-hearted fish, who 
show no fight. True ; but their very cowardice makes 
them the more difficult to catch ; for no fish must you 
keep more out of sight, and further off. The very 
shadow of the line (not to mention that of the rod) 
sends them flying to hover ; and they rise so cautiously 
and quietly, that they give excellent lessons in patience 
and nerve to a beginner. If the fly is dragged along 
the surface, or jerked suddenly from them, they flee 
from it in terror ; and when they do, after due delibera- 
tion, take it in, their rise is so quiet, that you can 
seldom tell whether your fish weighs half a pound 
or four pounds and a half— unless you, like most 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 



beginners, attempt to show your quickness by that 
most useless exertion, a violent strike. Then, the snap- 
ping of your footlink, or — just as likely — of the top of 
your rod, makes you fully aware, if not of the pluck, at 
least of the brute strength, of the burly alderman of 
the waters. No fish, therefore, will better teach the 
beginner the good old lesson, 'not to frighten a fish 
before you have tired him.' 

For flies— chub will rise greedily at any large 
palmers, the larger and rougher the better. A red and 
a grizzled hackle will always take them ; but the best 
fly of all is an imitation of the black beetle — the 
• undertaker ' of the London shops. He, too, can 
hardly be too large, and should be made of a fat body 
of black wool, with the metallic black feather of a 
cock's tail wrapped loosely over it. A still better wing 
is one of the neck feathers of any metallic-plumed bird, 
e.g., Phlogopliorus Imjjeyanus, the Menaul Pheasant, 
laid flat and whole on the back, to imitate the wing- 
shells of the beetle, the legs being represented by any 
loose black feathers — (not hackles, which are too fine.) 
Tied thus, it will kill not only every chub in a pool (if 
you give the survivors a quarter of an hour wherein to 
recover from their horror at their last friend's fate), but 
also, here and there, very large trout. 

Another slur upon the noble sport of chub fishing 
is the fact of his not being worth eating — a fact which, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



in the true sportsman's eyes, will go for nothing. But 
though the man who can buy fresh soles and salmon 
may despise chub, there are those who do not. True, 
you may make a most accurate imitation of him by 
taking one of Palmer's patent candles, wick and all, 
stuffing it with needles and split bristles, and then 
stewing the same in ditch-water. Nevertheless, strange 
to say, the agricultural stomach digests chub ; and if, 
after having filled your creel, or three creels (as you 
may too often), with them, you will distribute them 
on your way home to all the old women you meet, you 
will make many poor souls happy, after having saved 
the lives of many trout. 

But here we come to a strip of thick cover, part of 
our Squire's home preserves, which it is impossible to 
fish, so closely do the boughs cover the water. We will 
walk on through it towards the hall, and there get — 
what we begin sorely to need — something to eat. It 
will be of little use fishing for some time to come ; for 
these hot hours of the afternoon, from three till six, 
are generally the ' deadest time ' of the whole day. 

And now, when we have struggled in imagination 
through the last bit of copse, and tumbled over the 
palings into the lawn, we shall see a scene quite as 
lovely, if you will believe it, as any alp on earth. 

What shall we see, as we look across the broad, still, 
dlear river, where the great dark trout sail to and fro 



CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 87 

lazily in the sun ? For having free-warren of our fancy 
and our paper, we may see what we choose. 

White chalk-fields above, quivering hazy in the heat. 
A park full of merry haymakers ; gay red and blue 
waggons ; stalwart horses switching off the flies ; dark 
avenues of tall elms ; groups of abele, ' tossing their 
whispering silver to the sun ;' and amid them the 
house. What manner of house shall it be ? Tudor or 
Elizabethan, with oriels, mullioned windows, gables, 
and turrets of strange shape ? JSTo : that is common- 
place. Everybody builds Tudor houses now. Our 
house shall smack of Inigo Jones or Christopher Wren ; 
a great square red-brick mass, made light and cheerful 
though, by quoins and windows of white Sarsden stone ; 
with high-peaked French roofs, broken by louvres and 
dormers, haunted by a thousand swallows and starlings. 
Old walled gardens, gay with flowers, shall stretch right 
and left. Clipt yew alleys shall wander away into 
mysterious glooms : and out of their black arches shall 
come tripping children, like white fairies, to laugh and 
talk with the girl who lies dreaming and reading in 
the hammock there, beneath the black velvet canopy 
of the great cedar-tree, like some fair Tropic flower 
hanging from its boughs. Then they shall wander 
down across the smooth-shorn lawn, where the purple 
rhododendrons hang double, bush and image, over the 
water's edge, and call to us across the stream, ' What 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



sport ? ' and the old Squire shall beckon the keeper over 
the long stone bridge, and return with him bringing 
luncheon and good ale ; and we will sit down, and eat 
and drink among the burdock leaves, and then, watch 
the quiet house, and lawn, and flowers, and fair human 
creatures, and shining water, all sleeping breathless in 
the glorious light beneath the glorious blue, till we doze 
off, lulled by the murmur of a thousand insects, and the 
rich minstrelsy of nightingale and blackcap, thrush 
and dove. 

Peaceful, graceful, complete English country life and 
country houses ; everywhere finish and polish ; Nature 
perfected by the wealth and art of peaceful centuries ! 
Why should I exchange you, even for the sight of all 
the Alps, for bad roads, bad carriages, bad -inns, bad 
foocL bad washing, bad beds, and fleas, fleas, fleas ? 

Let that last thought be enough. There may be 
follies, there may be sorrows, there may be sins — though 
I know there are no very heavy ones — in that fine old 
house opposite : but thanks to the genius of my native 
land, there are at least no fleas. 

Think of that, wandering friend ; and of this also, 
that you will find your warm bath ready when you go 
to bed to-night, and your cold one when you rise to- 
morrow morning; and in content and thankfulness, 
stay in England, and be clean. 



CHAL K-STEEA M STUDIES. 



Here, then, let us lounge a full two hours, too com- 
fortable and too tired to care for fishing, till the hall- 
bell rings for that dinner which we as good anglers will 
despise. Then we will make our way to the broad 
reaches above the house. The evening breeze should be 
ruffling them gallantly ; and see, the fly is getting up. 
Countless thousands are rising off the grass, and flicker- 
ing to and fro above the stream. Stand still a moment, 
and you will hear the air full of the soft rustle of innu- 
merable wings. Hundreds more, even more delicate 
and gauzy, are rising through the water, and floating 
helplessly along the surface, as Aphrodite may have 
done when she rose in the iEgean, half frightened at 
the sight of the new upper world. And, see, the great 
trout are moving everywhere. Fish too large and well 
fed to care for the fly at any other season, who have 
been lounging among the weeds all day and snapping at 
passing minnows, have come to the surface ; and are 
feeding steadily, splashing five or six times in succes- 
sion, and then going down awhile to bolt their mouthful 
of victims ; while here and there a heavy silent swirl 
tells of a fly taken before it has reached the surface, 
untimely slain before it has seen the day. 

Now — put your Green-drake on ; and throw, regard- 
less of bank-fishing or any other rule, wherever you see 
a fish rise. Do not work your flies in the least, but let 
them float down over the fish, or sink if they will ; he 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



is more likely to take them under water than on the 
top. And mind this rule : be patient with your fish ; 
and do not fancy that because he does not rise to you 
the first or the tenth time, therefore he will not rise at 
all. He may have filled his mouth and gone down to 
gorge ; and when he comes up again, if your fly be the 
first which he meets, he will probably seize it greedily, 
and all the more so if it be under water, so seeming 
drowned and helpless. Besides, a fish seldom rises twice 
exactly in the same place, unless he be lying between 
two weeds, or in the corner of an eddy. His small 
wits, when he is feeding in the open, seem to hint to 
him that after having found a fly in one place he must 
move a foot or two on to find another ; and therefore it 
may be some time before your turn comes, and your fly 
passes just over his nose; which if it do not do, he 
certainly will not, amid such an abundance, go out of 
his way for it. In the meanwhile your footlink will 
very probably have hit him over the back, or run foul 
of his nose, in which case you will not catch him at all. 
A painful fact for you ; but if you could catch every 
fish you saw, where would be the trout for next season ? 
Put on a dropper of some kind, say a caperer, as a 
second chance. I almost prefer the dark claret-spin- 
ner, with which I have killed very large fish alternately 
with the green-drake, even when it was quite dark ; 
and for your stretcher, of course a green-drake. 



CHALK-STREA M STUDIED 



For a blustering evening like this your drake can 
hardly be too large or too rough ; in brighter and 
stiller weather the fish often prefer a fly half the size 
of the natural one. Only bear in mind that the most 
tempting form among these millions of drakes is that 
one whose wings are very little coloured at all, of a 
pale greenish yellow ; whose body is straw-coloured, and 
his head, thorax, and legs, spotted with dark brown — 
best represented by a pheasant or coch-a-bonddhu 
hackle. 

The best imitation of this, or of any drake, which I 
have ever seen, is one by Mr. Macgowan, whilome of 
Ballyshannon, now of No. 7, Bruton-street, Berkeley- 
square, whose drakes, known by a waxy body of some 
mysterious material, do surpass those of all other men, 
and should be known and honoured far and wide. But 
failing them, you may do well with a drake which is 
ribbed through the whole length with red hackle over 
a straw-coloured body. A North-countryman would 
laugh at it, and ask us how we fancy that fish will 
mistake for that delicate waxy fly a heavy rough palmer, 
made heavier and rougher by two thick tufts of yellow 
mallard wing : but if he will fish therewith, he will 
catch trout ; and mighty ones they will be. I. have 
found, again and again, this drake, in which the hackle 
is ribbed all down the body, beat a bare-bodied one in 
the ratio of three fish to one. The reason is difficult to 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



guess. Perhaps the shining transparent hackle gives 
the fly more of the waxy ]ook of the natural insect ; or 
perhaps the ' buzzly ' look of the fly causes the fish to 
mistake it for one half emerged from its pupa case, 
fluttering, entangled, and helpless. But whatever be 
the cause, I am sure of the fact. Now— silence and 
sport for the next three hours. 

***** 

There ! All things must end. It is so dark that I 
have been fishing for the last five minutes without any 
end fly ; and we have lost our two last fish simply by 
not being able to guide them into the net. But what 
an evening's sport we have had ! Beside several over 
a pound which I have thrown in (I trust you have 
been generous and done likewise), there are six fish 
averaging two pounds apiece ; and what is the weight 
of that monster with whom I saw you wrestling dimly 
through the dusk, your legs stuck knee-deep in a 
mudbank, your head embowered in nettles, while the 
keeper waltzed round you, roaring mere incoherencies ? 
— four pounds full. Now, is there any sherry left in 
the flask ? No. Then we will give the keeper five 
shillings ; he is well worth his pay ; and then drag our 
weary limbs towards the hall to bath, supper, and bed ; 
while you confess, I trust, that you may get noble sport, 
hard exercise, and lovely scenery, without going sixty 
miles from London town. 



III. 

THE PENS. 



III. 

THE FENS. 

A certain sadness is pardonable to one who watches 
the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even 
though its destruction bring blessings to the human 
race. Eeason and conscience tell us, that it is right 
and good that the Great Fen should have become, 
instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden 
of the Lord, where 

' All the land in flowery squares, 
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wind, 
Smells of the coming summer. ' 

And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over 
the shining meres, the golden reed-beds, the countless 
water-fowl, the strange and gaudy insects, the wild 
nature, the mystery, the majesty — for mystery and 
majesty there were — which haunted the deep fens for 
many a hundred years. Little thinks the Scotsman, 
whirled down by the Great Northern Eailway from 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even 
twenty years ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, 
which is now but a black, unsightly, steaming flat, 
from which the meres and reed-beds of the old world 
are gone, while the corn and roots of the new world 
have not as yet taken their place. 

But grand enough it was, that black ugly place, 
when backed by Caistor Hanglands and Holme Wood, 
and the patches of the primaeval forest ; while dark- 
green alders, and pale-green reeds, stretched for miles 
round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and 
the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content 
with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the 
birds around ; while high overhead hung, motionless, 
hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite 
beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon 
the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, 
invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then 
down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion- 
gun ; and after that sound another sound, louder as it 
neared ; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all 
the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and 
whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, 
piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the 
hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all 
sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the 
trumpet note of the great wild swan. 



THE FENS. 97 



They are all gone now. No longer do the ruffs 
trample the sedge into a hard floor in their fighting- 
rings, while the sober reeves stand round, admiring 
the tournament of their lovers, gay with ears and tip- 
pets, no two of them alike. Gone are ruffs and reeves, 
spoonbills, bitterns, avosets ; the very snipe, one hears, 
disdains to breed. Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea 
but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of 
English butterflies, Lyccena dispar — the great copper ; 
and many a curious insect more. Ah, well, -at least we 
shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more 
typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more 
brandy-drinking and opium- eating; and children will 
live and not die. For it was a hard place to live in, 
the old Fen ; a place wherein one heard of ' unex- 
ampled instances of longevity,' for the same reason 
that one hears of them in savage tribes — that few lived 
to old age at all, save those iron constitutions which 
nothing could break down. 

And' now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been 
fighting water by the help of wind, have given up the 
more capricious element for that more manageable 
servant fire ; have replaced their wind-mills by steam- 
engines, which will work in all weathers ; and have 
pumped the whole fen dry— even too dry, as the last 
hot summer proved ; when the only bit of the primaeval 
wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres of 

K H 



FROSE IDYLLS. 



sweet sedge and Zastrcea thelypteris in Wicken Fen : 
there can be no harm in lingering awhile over the past, 
and telling of what the Great Fen was, and how it came 
to be that great flat which reaches (roughly speaking) 
from Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-west 
side, to Lynn and Tattershall on the north-east, some 
forty miles and more each way. 

To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen 
came to be, one must go back, it seems to me, to 
an age before all history; an age which cannot be 
measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in 
mystery, and to be spoken of only in guesses. To 
assert anything positively concerning that age, or 
ages, would be to show the rashness of ignorance. 
'I think that I believe,' 'I have good reason to sus- 
pect,' ' I seem to see/ are the strongest forms of speech 
which ought to be used over a matter so vast and 
as yet so little elaborated. 

'I seem to see,' then, an epoch after those strata 
were laid down with which geology generally deals ; 
after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxford clay, and Gault 
clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens, 
with their intermediate beds of coral-rag and green 
sand, had been deposited ; after the chalk had been 
laid on the top of them, at the bottom of some 
ancient ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is 
implied in that last ' after ! ') the boulder-clay (coeval 






THE FENS. 



probably with the ' till ' of Scotland) had been spread 
out in the ' age of ice ' on top of all ; after the whole 
had been upheaved out of the sea, and stood about 
the same level as it stands now : but before the great 
valley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the 
strata were still continuous, some 200 feet above 
Cambridge and its colleges, from the top of the Gog- 
magogs to the top of Madingley Eise. 

In those ages — while the valleys of the Cam, the 
Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, the . Glen, and the 
Witham were sawing themselves out by no violent 
convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same- 
slow action of rain and rivers by which they are 
sawing backward into the land even now — I 'seem 
to see ' a time when the Straits of Dover did not 
exist — a time when a great part of the German Ocean 
was dry land. Through it, into a great estuary between 
North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the 
rivers of north-eastern Europe — Elbe, Weser, Ehine, 
Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east 
England, as far north as the Humber. 

And if a reason be required for so daring a theory 
— first started, if I recollect right, by the late lamented 
Edward Forbes — a sufficient one may be found in one 
look over a bridge, in any river of the East of Eng- 
land. There we see various species of Cyprinidse, 
'rough' or 'white' fish— roach, dace, chub, bream, 

h 2 



100 . PROSE IDYLLS, 



and so forth, and with them their natural attendant 
and devourer, the pike. 

Now these fish belong almost exclusively to the 
same system of rivers — those of north-east Europe. 
They attain their highest development in the great 
lakes of Sweden. Westward of the Straits of Dover 
they are not indigenous. They may be found in the 
streams of south and western England; but in every 
case, I believe, they have been introduced either by 
birds or by men. From some now submerged ' centre 
of-- creation' (to use poor Edward Forbes's formula) 
they must have spread into the rivers where they 
are now found; and spread by fresh water, and not 
by salt, which would destroy them in a single tide. 

Again, there lingers in the Cam, and a few other 
rivers of north-eastern Europe, that curious fish the 
eel-pout or ' burbot ' (Molva lota). Now he is utterly 
distinct from any other fresh-water fish of Europe. 
His nearest ally is the ling (Molva vulgaris) ; a deep- 
sea fish, even as his ancestors have been. Originally 
a deep-sea form, he has found his way up the rivers, 
even to Cambridge, and there remains. The rivers 
by which he came up, the land through which he 
passed, ages and ages since, have been all swept 
away; and he has never found his way back to his 
native salt-water, but lives on in a strange land, 
degraded in form, dwindling in numbers, and now 



THE FENS. 



fast dying out. The explanation may be strange : 
but it is the only one which I can offer to explain 
the fact — which is itself much more strange — of the 
burbot being found in the Fen rivers. 

Another proof may be found in the presence of 
the edible frog of the Continent at Foulinire, on the 
edge of the Cambridge Fens. It is a moot point still 
with some, whether he was not put there by man. 
It is a still stronger argument against his being indi- 
genous, that he is never mentioned as an article of 
f©od by the mediaeval monks, who would have known 
— Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many of them 
were — that he is as dainty as ever was a spring 
chicken. But if he be indigenous, his presence 
proves that once he could either hop across the 
Straits of Dover, or swim across the German Ocean. 

But there can be no doubt of the next proof — the 
presence in the Fens (where he is now probably 
extinct) and in certain spots in East Anglia, which 
I shall take care not to mention, of that exquisite 
little bird the 'Bearded Tit' (Calamophilus biarmicus). 
Tit he is none; rather, it is said, a finch, but con- 
nected with no other English bird. His central home 
is in the marshes of Eussia and Prussia; his food the 
mollusks which swarm among the reed-beds where he 
builds ; and feeding on those from reed-bed to reed- 
bed, all across what was once the German Ocean, has 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



come the beautiful little bird with long tail, orange 
tawny plumage, and black moustache, which might 
have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on every 
reed-rond of the Fen. 

One more proof — for it is the heaping up of facts, 
each minute by itself, which issues often in a sound 
and great result. In draining Wretham Mere, in Nor- 
folk, not so very far from the Fens, in the year 1856 
there were found embedded in the peat moss (which 
is not the Scotch and Western Sphagnum palustre, but 
an altogether different moss, LTypnum jluitans), remains 
of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles. A 
dwelling like those which have lately attracted so 
much notice in the lakes of Switzerland : like those 
which the Dyaks make about the ports and rivers of 
Borneo ; dwellings invented, it seems to me, to enable 
the inhabitants to escape not wild beasts only, but 
malaria and night frosts ; and, perched above the cold 
and poisonous fogs, to sleep, if not high and dry, at 
least high and healthy. 

In the bottom of this mere were found two shells of 
the fresh-water tortoise, Emys lutaria, till then un- 
known in England. 

These little animals, who may be seen in hundreds 
in the meres of eastern Europe, sunning their backs on 
fallen logs, and diving into the water at the sound of ; 
ibotstep, are eaten largely in continental capitals ( 



THE FENS. 103 

their cousin the terrapin, Emys picta, in the Southern 
States). They may be bought at Paris, at fashionable 
restaurants. Thither they may have been sent from 
Vienna or Berlin; for in north France, Holland, and' 
north-west Germany they are unknown. A few spe- 
cimens have been found buried in peat in Sweden and 
Denmark ; and there is a tale of a live one having been 
found in the extreme south part of Sweden, some 
twenty years ago. 1 Into Sweden, then, as into Eng- 
land, the little fresh- water tortoise had wandered, as to 
an extreme limit, beyond which the change of climate, 
and probably of food, killed him off. 

But the emys which came to the Wretham bog must 
have had a long journey ; and a journey by fresh water 
too. Down Elbe or "Weser he must have floated, ice- 
packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhere off the ( 
Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which 
is now open sea, he or his descendants turned up 
Ou.se and Little Ouse, till they found a mere like their 
old Prussian one, and there founded a tiny colony for a 
few generations, till they were eates up by the savages 
of the table dwelling ; or died out — as many a human 
family has died out — because they found the world too 
hard. 

1 For these details I am indebted to a paper in the ' .Annals of 
Natural History,' for September 1862, by my friend, Professor Alfred 
Newton, of Cambridge. 



104 PROSE IDYLLS. 

And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to 
naturalists, has found that many forms of Entomastraca 
are common to the estuaries of the east of England and 
to those of Holland. 

It was thus necessary, in order to account for the 
presence of some of the common animals of the fen, 
to go back to an epoch of immense remoteness. 

And how was that great lowland swept away ? Who 
can tell ? Probably by no violent convulsion. Slow 
upheavals, slow depressions, there may have been — 
indeed must have been — as the sunken fir-forests of 
Brancaster, and the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the 
extreme north-east corner of the Wash, testify to this 
day. But the main agent of destruction has been, 
doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-wash which 
devours still the soft strata of the whole east coast of 
England, as far as Elamborough Head ; and that great 
scavenger, the tide-wave, which sweeps the fallen 
rubbish out to sea twice in every twenty-four hours. 
Wave and tide by sea, rain and river by land ; these 
are God's mighty mills in which He makes the old 
world new. And as Longfellow says of moral things, 
so may we of physical : — 



'Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding 

small. 

Though He sit, and wait with patience, with exactness grinds 
He all.' 



THE FENS. 



The lighter and more soluble particles, during that 
slow but vast destruction which is going on still to 
this day, have been carried far out to sea, and deposited 
as ooze. The heavier and coarser have been left along 
the shores, as the gravels which fill the old estuaries of 
the east of England. 

From these gravels we can judge of the larger 
animals which dwelt in tlmt old world. About these 
lost lowlands wandered herds of the woolly mammoth, 
Elephas primigenius, whose bones are common in cer- 
tain Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by 
dredgers, far out in the German Ocean, off certain parts 
of the Norfolk coast. With them wandered the woolly 
rhinoceros (E. tichorhinus), the hippopotamus, the lion 
— not (according to some) to be distinguished from the 
recent lion of Africa — the hyeena, the bear, the horse, 
the reindeer, and the musk ox ; the great Irish elk, 
whose vast horns are so well known in every museum 
of northern Europe ; and that mighty ox, the Bos pri- 
migenius, which still lingered on the Continent in 
Caesar's time, as the urus, in magnitude less only than 
the elephant, — and not to be confounded with the 
bison, a relation of, if not identical with, the buffalo of 
North America, — which still lingers, carefully preserved 
by the Czar, in the forests of Lithuania. 

The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are 
found throughout Britain, and even into the Shetland 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Isles. Would that any gentleman who may see these 
pages would take notice of the fact, that we have not 
(so I am informed) in these islands a single perfect 
skeleton of Bos primigenius ; while the Museum of 
Copenhagen, to its honour, possesses five or six from a 
much smaller field than is open to us ; and be public- 
spirited enough, the next time he hears of ox-bones, 
whether in gravel or in peat (as he may in the drain- 
ing of any northern moss), to preserve them for the 
museum of his neighbourhood — or send them to Cam- 
bridge. 

But did all these animals exist at the same time ? 
It is difficult to say. The study of the different gravels 
is most intricate — almost a special science in itself — in 
which but two or three men are adepts. It is hard, at 
first sight, to believe that the hippopotamus could have 
been the neighbour of the Arctic reindeer and musk ox : 
but that the woolly mammoth not only may have been 
such, but was such, there can be no doubt. His remains, 
imbedded in ice at the mouth of the great Siberian 
rivers, with the wool, skin, and flesh (in some cases) 
still remaining on the bones, prove him to have been 
fitted for a cold climate, and to have browsed upon the 
scanty shrubs of Northern Asia. But, indeed, there is 
no reason, d priori, why these huge mammals, now con- 
fined to hotter countries, should not have once inhabited 
a colder region, or at least have wandered northwards in 



THE FENS. 107 

whole herds in summer, to escape insects, and find fresh 
food, and above all, water. The same is the case with 
the lion, and other huge "beasts of prey. The tiger of 
Hindostan ranges, at least in summer, across the snows 
of the Himalaya, and throughout China. Even at the 
river Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St. 
Petersburg, the tiger is an ordinary resident at all 
seasons. The lion was, undoubtedly, an inhabitant of 
Thrace as late as the expedition of Xerxes, whose 
camels they attacked ; and the ' Nemiean lion,' and the 
other lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having 
been killed by Hercules and the heroes, may have been 
the last remaining specimens of that Felis spclcea (un- 
distinguishable, according to some, from the African 
lion), whose bones are found in the gravels and the 
caverns of these isles. 

And how long ago were those days of mammoths 
and reindeer, lions and hysenas ? We must talk not of 
days, but of ages ; we know nothing of days or years. 
As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has well 
said : — 

' We allow that the great European oscillation, which 
ended in the production of the drift (the boulder clay, 
or till), was effected during a time of vast, but unknown 
length. And if we limit our inquiries, and ask what 
was the interval of time between the newest bed of 
gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bog-land 



FEOSE IDYLLS. 



or silt in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at 
a loss for a definite answer. The interval of time may- 
have been very great. But we have no scale on which 
to measure it.' 

Let us suppose, then, the era of ' gravels ' past ; the 
valleys which open into the fen sawn out by rivers 
to about their present depth. What was the special 
cause of the fen itself? why did not the great lowland 
become a fertile ' carse ' of firm alluvial soil, like that 
of Stirling ? 

One reason is, that the carse of Stirling has been 
upheaved some twenty feet, and thereby more or less 
drained, since the time of the Eomans. A fact patent 
and provable from Cramond (the old Roman port of 
Alaterna) up to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where 
whales' skeletons, and bone tools by them, have been 
found in loam and peat, twenty feet above high-water 
mark. The alluvium of the fens, on the other hand, has 
very probably suffered a slight depression. 

But the main reason is, that the silt brought down 
by the fen rivers cannot, like that of the Forth and its 
neighbouring streams, get safe away to sea. From 
Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the Lincoln- 
shire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the 
waves ; and swept southward by tide and current, the 
debris turns into the Wash between Lincolnshire and 
Norfolk, there to repose, as in a quiet haven. 



THE FENS. 



Hence that vast labyrinth of banks between Lynn 
and Wisbeach, of mud inside, brought down by the fen 
rivers ; but outside (contrary to the usual rule) of shift- 
ing sand, which has come inward from the sea, and 
prevents the mud's escape — banks parted by narrow 
gullies, the delight of the gunner with his punt, haunted 
by million wild-fowl in winter, and in summer hazy 
steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire 
loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, 
while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, 
fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even 
inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such 
tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along 
the top of the mud banks lounge the long black rows of 
seals, undistinguishable from their reflection in the still 
water below ; distorted too, and magnified to the size of 
elephants. Long lines of sea-pies wing their way along 
at regular tide-hours, from or to the ocean. Now and 
then a skein of geese paddle hastily out of sight round 
a mud-cape ; or a brown robber gull (generally Eichard- 
son's Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a 
raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten 
them into vomiting up their prey for his benefit ; or a 
single cormorant flaps along, close to the water, towards 
his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of haunting 
a bottom which shifts with every storm ; and innumer- 
able shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow 



110 FBOSE IDYLLS. 



barren sea : beside, all is silence and desolation, as of s 
world waiting to be made. 

So strong is the barrier which these sea-borne sands 
oppose to the river-borne Ooze, that as soon as a sea- 
bank is built 1 — as the projectors of the 'Victoria County' 
have built them — across any part of the estuary, the 
mud caught by it soon ' warps ' the space within into 
firm and rich dry land. But that same barrier, ere the 
fen was drained, backed up for ages not only the silt, 
but the very water of the fens ; and spread it inland into 
a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast 
peat bogs, on those impervious clays which floor the fen. 
Each river contributed to the formation of those bogs 
and meres, instead of draining them away ; repeating on 
a huge scale the process which may be seen in many a 
highland strath, where the ground at the edge of the 
stream is firm and high ; the meadows near the hillfoot, 
a few hundred yards away, bogland lower than the 
bank of the stream. For each flood deposits its silt 
upon the immediate bank of the river, raising it year" 
by year ; till — as in the case of the ' Levee ' of the 
Mississippi, and probably of every one of the old fen 
rivers — the stream runs at last between two natural 
dykes, at a level considerably higher than that of the 
now swamped and undrainable lands right and left 
of it. 

If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so ex- 



THE FENS. 



traordinarily slight, that the river at Cambridge is only 
thirteen and a half feet above the mean sea level, five- 
and-thirty miles away, and that if the great sea-sluice 
of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed 
away, the tide would back up the Cam to within ten 
miles of Cambridge ; if we add again the rainfall upon 
that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape through 
rivers which have enough to do to drain the hills 
around ; it is .easy to understand how peat, the certain 
product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the 
rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those phos- 
phatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science 
of the lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding 
round Cambridge supplies of manure seemingly inex- 
haustible. Easy it is to understand how the all-devour- 
ing, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually 
the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel 
and yew, which once grew on that rank land ; how 
trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated and lodged 
in rafts, damming the waters back still more ; how 
streams, bewildered in the fiats, changed their channels, 
mingling silt and sand with the peat-moss ; how Nature, 
left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos more and 
more ; till the whole fen became one ' Dismal Swamp,' 
in which the ' Last of the English ' (like Dred in Mrs. 
Stowe's tale) took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, 
like him, a free and joyous life awhile. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, 
which have escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss ; 
outcrops of firm land, which even in the Middle Age 
preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primaeval forest, 
haunted by the descendants of some at least of those 
wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the 
'gravel age.' The all-preserving peat, as well as the 
monkish records of the early Middle Age, enable us to 
repeople, tolerably well, the primaeval fen. 

The gigantic ox, Bos primigenins, was still there, 
though there is no record of him in monkish tales. But 
with him had appeared (not unknown toward the end 
of the gravel age) another ox, smaller- and with shorter 
horns, Bos longifrons ; which is held to be the ancestor of 
our own domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle still 
preserved at Chillingham and at Cadzow. The reindeer 
had disappeared, almost or altogether. The red deer, of 
a size beside which the largest Scotch stag is puny, and 
even the great Carpathian stag inferior, abound ; so does 
the roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to 
look on as a mountain animal. In the Woodwardian 
Museum there is a portion of a skull of an ibex — pro- 
bably Cajpra sibirica — which was found in the drift gravel 
at Fulbourne. Wild sheep are unknown. The horse 
occurs in the peat ; but whether wild or tame, who can 
tell ? Horses enough have been mired and drowned since 
the Eomans set foot on this island, to account for the 



THE FBX8. 



presence of horses' skulls, without the hypothesis of 
wild herds, such as doubtless existed in the gravel 
times. The wolf, of course, is common ; wild cat, 
marten, badger, and otter all would expect ; but not so 
the beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat ; 
and damage enough the busy fellows must have done, 
cutting trees, damming streams, flooding marshes, and 
like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the 
public interest to their own. Here and there are found 
the skulls of bears, in one case that of a polar bear, 
ice-drifted; and one of a walrus, probably washed in 
dead after a storm. 

Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the 
eyes of the monks who were the first settlers in the 
wilderness. 

The author of the History of Eamsey grows enthu- 
siastic, and, after the manner of old monks, some- 
what bombastic also, as he describes the lonely isle 
which got its name from the solitary ram who had 
wandered thither, either in some extreme drought or 
over the winter ice, and nfever able to return, was found, 
fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild 
deer. He tells of the stately ashes — most of them cut 
in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church 
roof ; of the rich pastures painted with all gay flowers 
in spring ; of the ' green crown ' of reed and alder 
which girdled round the isle ; of the fair wide mere with 

K I 



FROSE IDYLLS. 



its ' sandy beach ' along the forest side : ' a delight,' he 
says, ' to all who look thereon.' 

In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in 
the first half of the twelfth century, speaks of Thorney 
Abbey and isle. ' It represents,' he says, ' a very Para- 
dise, for that in pleasure and delight it resembles heaven 
itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length 
without a knot doth emulate the stars. The plain there 
is as level as the sea, which with green grass allures 
the eye, and so smooth that there is nought to hinder 
him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste 
place : for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, 
which are either spread on the ground or raised on 
poles. A mutual strife is there between nature and 
art ; so that what one produces not, the other supplies. 
What shall I say of those fair buildings, which 'tis 
so wonderful to see the ground among those fens 
- upbear 1 ' 

But the most detailed picture of a feh-isle is that 
in the second part of the Book of Ely ; wherein a 
single knight of all the French army forces his way 
into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably enter- 
tained there by Hereward and his English, is sent 
back safe to William the Conqueror, to tell him of 
the strength of Ely isle. 

He cannot praise enough — his speech may be 
mythical ; but as written by Eichard of Ely, only 



THE FUNS. 



one veneration after, it must describe faithfully what 
the place was like — the wonders of the isle : its soil 
the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble 
hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though 
its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good right to 
say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres 
and bogs, about it like a wall. In it was, to quote 
roughly, ' abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, 
roe, and goat, in grove and marsh ; martens, and 
ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were 
caught in snares or gins. But of the kind of fish 
and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In 
the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great 
water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, 
lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents ; 
smelts, too ; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a 
mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken. 
But of the birds which haunt around, if you be not 
tired, as of the rest, we will expound. Innumerable 
geese, gulls, coots, divers, water- crows, herons, ducks, 
of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or 
at moulting time, I have seen hundreds taken at a 
time, by nets, springes, or birdlime,' and so forth ; 
till, as he assures William, the Frenchman may sit 
on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years 
more, ' ere they will make one ploughman stop 
short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, 

i 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



or one fowler to deceive the birds with, springe and 
snare.' 

And yet. there was another side to the picture. 
Man lived hard in those days, under dark skies, in 
houses — even the most luxurious of them — which we 
should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for 
felons' cells. Hardly they lived ; and easily were they 
pleased, and thankful to God for the least gleam of 
sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible 
and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly 
enough those winters must have been, what with 
snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and 
rheumatism ; while through the long drear winter 
nights the whistle of the wind and the wild cries 
of the water-fowl were translated into the howls 
of witches and demons ; and (as in St. Guthlac's 
case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made 
fiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, 
and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man's 
bed of sedge. 

The Eomans seem to have done something toward 
the draining and embanking of this dismal swamp. 
To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water 
drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough 
northward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land 
waters which flow down from the wolds above. To 
them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, 



THE FENS. 117 



or ' vallum,' along the sea-face of the marshlands, 
marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, 
Walton, and Walpoole. But the English invaders 
were incapable of following out, even of preserving, 
any public works. Each village was isolated by its 
own ' march ' of forest ; each yeoman all but isolated 
by the ' eaves-drip,' or green lane round his farm. 
Each 'cared for his own things, and none for those 
of others;' and gradually r during the early Middle 
Age, the fen — save those old Eoman villages — returned 
to its primaeval jungle, under the neglect of a race 
which caricatured local self-government into public 
anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien 
enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came 
through the forest without calling aloud or blowing 
a horn. Till late years, the English feeling against 
the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer, 
strong in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass 
him into the next parish. The labourer, not being- 
versed in law, hove half a brick at him, or hooted 
him through the town. It was in the fens, perhaps, 
that the necessity of combined effort for fighting 
the brute powers of nature first awakened public 
spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a 
common interest between men of different countries 
and races. 

But the progress was very slow ; and the first 



118 PBOSE IDYLLS. 

civilizers of the fen were men who had nothing less 
in their minds than to conquer nature, or call to- 
gether round them communities of men. Hermits, 
driven by that passion for isolated independence 
which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into 
the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be 
alone with God and their own souls. Like St. 
Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for five- 
and-twenty years, they longed for peace and soli- 
tude ; and from their longing, carried out with that 
iron will which marked the mediaeval man for good 
or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never 
dreamed. 

Those who wish to understand the old fen life, 
should read Ingulfs ' History of Crowland ' (Mr. Bonn 
has published a good and cheap translation), and 
initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of 
thought, so utterly different from our own, that we 
seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another 
planet. Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf 
and his continuator, ' Peter of Blois ; ' and though 
their facts are not to be depended on as having actually 
happened, they are still instructive, as showing what 
might, or ought to have happened, in the opinion of 
the men of old. 

Even more naive is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. 
Guthlac, written possibly as early as the eighth 



THE FEXS. 



century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin, of 
Cambridge. 

There we may read how the young warrior- 
noble, Guthlac ('The Battle-Play,' the 'Sport of 
War'), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought him 
to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth ; how he 
wandered into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after 
became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a 
spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in 
reeds and alders ; and among the trees, nought but 
an old 'law,' as the Scots still call a mound, which 
men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and 
a little pond ; and how he built himself a hermit's 
cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles ; 
and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman 
of the East ; notably one Beccel, who acted as his 
servant ; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint 
one day, there fell on him a great temptation : Why 
should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and install 
himself in his cell, that he might have the honour 
and glory of sainthood ? But St. Guthlac perceived 
the inward temptation (which is told with the naive 
honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked 
the offender into confession, and all went well to the 
end. 

There we may read, too, a detailed account of a 
Fauna now happily extinct in the fens : of the creatures 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his hut, drag him 
through the bogsj carry him aloft through frost and 
fire — ' Develen and hither gostes ' — such as tormented 
likewise St. Botolph (from whom Botulfston=Boston, 
has its name), and who were supposed to haunt the 
meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for 
old heathen harrows with their fancied treasure hoards ; 
how they 'filled the house with their coming, and 
poured in on every side, from above, and from beneath, 
and everywhere. They were in countenance horrible, 
and they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean 
visage; they were filthy and squalid in their beards, 
and they had rough ears, and crooked nebs, and fierce 
eyes, and foul mouths ; and their teeth were like horses' 
tasks ; and their throats were filled with flame, and 
they were grating in their voice ; they had crooked 
shanks, and knees big and great behind, and twisted 
toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they 
came with such immoderate noise and immense horror, 
that him thought all between heaven and earth 

resounded with their voices And they tugged 

and led him out of the cot, and led him to the swart 
fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters. 
After that they brought him into the wild places of the 
wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, that all 

his body was torn After that they took him and 

beat him with iron whips ; and after that they brought 



THE FENS. 121 



him on their creaking wings between the cold regions 
of the air.' 

But there are gentler and more human touches in that 
old legend. You may read in it, how all the wild birds 
of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he fed them after 
their kind. How the ravens tormented him, stealing 
letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors ; and then, 
seized with compunction at his reproofs, brought them 
back, or hanged them on the reeds ; and how, as Wilfrid, 
a holy visitant, was sitting with him, discoursing of 
the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, 
and lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint's hand, 
now on his shoulder, now on his knee. And how, when 
Wilfrid wondered thereat, Guthlac made answer, ' Know 
you not that he who hath led his life according to 
God's will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds 
draw the more near.' 

After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, agues, and 
starvation, no wonder if St. Guthlac died. They buried 
him in a leaden coffin (a grand and expensive luxury 
in the seventh century) which had been sent to him 
during his life by a Saxon princess ; and then, over his 
sacred and wonder-working corpse, as over that of a 
Buddhist saint, there rose a chapel, with a communit}*- 
of monks, companies of pilgrims who came to worship, 
sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on 
great piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Abbey of Crowland ; in its sanctuary of the four rivers, 
its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards, rich ploughlands, 
from which, in time of famine, the monks of Crow- 
land fed all people of the neighbouring fens ; with 
its tower with seven bells, which had not their like 
in England ; its twelve altars rich with the gifts of 
Danish Vikings and princes, and even with twelve 
white bear-skins, the gift of Canute's self ; while 
all around were the cottages of the corrodiers, or folk 
who, for a corrody, or life pittance from the abbey, 
had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment 
of their heirs. 

But within these four rivers, at least, was neither 
tyranny nor slavery. Those who took refuge in St. 
Guthlac's peace from cruel lords must keep his peace 
toward each other, and earn their living like honest 
men, safe while they did so; for between those four 
rivers St. Guthlac and his abbot were the only lords, 
and neither summoner, nor sheriff of the king, nor 
armed force of knight or earl, could enter ' the inherit- 
ance of the Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartho- 
lomew, the most holy sanctuary of St. Guthlac and 
his monks ; the minster free from worldly servitude ; 
the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the 
sole refuge of anyone in worldly tribulation; the 
perpetual abode of the saints ; the possession of 
religious men, specially set apart by the common 



THE FENS. 



council of the realm ; by reason of the frequent 
miracles of the holy confessor St. Guthlac, an ever- 
fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards of 
Engedi; and by reason of the privileges granted 
by the kings, a city of grace and safety to all who 
repent.' 

Does not all this sound — as I said just now — like a 
voice from another planet ? It is all gone ; and it was 
good and right that it should go when it had done 
its work, and that the civilization of the fen should 
be taken up and carried out by men like the good 
knight, Eichard of Eulos, who, two generations after 
the Conquest, marrying Hereward's granddaughter, and 
becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought 
that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne 
as the monks did from their cloisters ; got permission 
from the Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, 
to drain as much as he could of the common marshes ; 
and then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built 
cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till 
' out of slough and bogs accursed, he made a garden of 
pleasure.' 

Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, 
besides those firm dykes and rich corn lands of the 
Porsand, which endure unto this day. For within two 
generations of the Norman conquest, while the old 
wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



by that noble pile of stone whose ruins are still 
standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French 
monks to open a school under the new French donjon, 
in the little Eoman town of Grante-brigge ; whereby 
— so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow 
and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever — St. 
Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into Crowland Island, 
became the spiritual father of the University of 
Cambridge in the old world ; and therefore of her 
noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in the 
new world which fen-men, sailing from Boston deeps, 
colonized and Christianized, 800 years after St. 
Guthlac's death. 

The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 
800 years slowly, and often disastrously. Great mis- 
takes were made ; as when a certain bishop, some 
700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from 
Littleport drain to Eebeck (or Priests'-houses), and 
found, to his horror and that of the fen-men, that 
he had let down upon Lynn the pent-up waters of 
the whole higher bogs; that rivers were running 
backwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole 
north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by 
banks confusedly thrown up in self-defence, till some 
order was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered 
—such little of them as could be drained at all — 
for nigh two hundred years. Honour, meanwhile, to 



another prelate, good Bishop Morton, who cut the 
great leam from Guyhirn — the last place at which 
one could see a standing gallows, and two Irish 
reapers hanging in chains, having murdered the old 
witch of Guyhirn for the sake of hidden treasure, 
which proved to be some thirty shillings and a few 
silver spoons. 

The belief is more general than well-founded that 
the drainage of the fens retrograded on account of the 
dissolution of the monasteries. The state of decay 
into which those institutions had already fallen, and 
which alone made their dissolution possible, must 
have extended itself to these fen-lands. No one can 
read the account of their debts, neglect, malversation 
of funds, in the time of Henry VIII., without seeing 
that the expensive works necessary to keep fen-lands 
dry must have suffered, as did everything else belong- 
ing to the convents. 

It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth's 
reign that the recovery of these ' drowned lands ' 
was proceeded with once more; and during the first 
half of the seventeenth century there went on, more 
and more rapidly, that great series of artificial works 
which, though often faulty in principle, often unex- 
pectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work done, as 
all work is done in this world, not as well as it should 
have been done, but at least done. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



To comprehend those works would be impossible 
without maps and plans; to take a lively interest in 
them impossible, likewise, save to an engineer or a fen- 
man. Suffice it to say, that in the early part of the 
seventeenth century we find a great company of adven- 
turers — more than one Cromwell among them, and 
Francis, the great and good Earl of Bedford, at their 
head — trying to start a great scheme for draining the 
drowned ' middle level ' east of the Isle of Ely. How 
they sent for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been 
draining in North Lincolnshire, about G-oole and Ax- 
holme Isle ; how they got into his hands, and were 
ruined by him ; how Francis of Bedford had to sell 
valuable estates to pay his share ; how the fen-men 
looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion ; how 
Charles I. persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bed- 
ford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630, 
given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to 
something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how 
Charles took the work into his hands, and made a 
Government job of it ; how Bedford died, and the fen- 
men looked on him as a martyr ; how Oliver Cromwell 
arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had sup- 
ported him in past times ; how Oliver St. John came to 
the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called 
'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compro- 
mise between Yermuyden and the adventurers, so able 



THE FENS. 127 



and useful that Charles II.'s Government were content 
to call it ' pretended ' and let it stand, because it was 
actually draining the fens ; and how Sir Cornelius 
Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking 
mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which 
never got answered ; how William, Earl of Bedford, 
added, in 1649, to his father's 'old Bedford Eiver' that 
noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, both rising high 
• above the land between dykes and ' washes/ i.e. waste 
spaces right and left, to allow for flood water ; how 
the Great Bedford Eivers silted up the mouth of the 
Ouse, and backed the floods up the Cam ; how Denver 
sluice was built to keep them back ; and so forth, — all 
is written, or rather only half or quarter written, in the 
histories of the fens. 

Another matter equally, or even more important, is 
but half written — indeed, only hinted at — the mixed 
population of the fens. 

The sturdy old ' Girvii,' ' Gyrwas,' men of the 
' gyras ' or marshes, who in Hereward's time sang 
their three-man glees, 'More Girviorum tripliciter 
canentes,' had been crossed with the blood of Scan- 
dinavian Vikings in Canute's conquest; crossed again 
with English refugees from all quarters during the 
French conquest under William. After the St. Bar- 
tholomew they received a fresh cross of Huguenot, 
fleeing from France — dark-haired, fiery, earnest folk, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



whose names and physiognomies are said still to 
remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. 
Then came Vermnyden's Dutchmen, leaving some of 
their blood behind them. After the battle of Dunbar 
another cross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, 
who, employed by Cromwell's Government on the 
dykes, settled down among the fen-men to this day. 
Within the memory of man, Scotchmen used to come 
down into the fens every year, not merely for harvest, 
but to visit their expatriated kinsmen. 

To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan 
blood, more than even the influence of the Cromwells 
and other Puritan gentlemen, we may attribute that 
strong Calvinist element which has endured for now 
nigh three centuries in the fen ; and attribute, too, that 
sturdy independence and self-help which drove them of 
old out of Boston town, to seek their fortunes first in 
Holland, then in Massachusetts over sea. And that 
sturdy independence and self-help is not gone. There 
still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic 
giant Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), 
who, when the Marshland men (possibly the Eomanized 
inhabitants of the wall villages) quarrelled with him in 
the field, took up the cart-axle for a club, smote them 
hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in their despite 
in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has 
ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the 



THE FENS. 129 

stern quiet temper which there is in these men, when 
the north-easter is howling above, the spring-tide roar- 
ing outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the 
dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray ; when round 
the one fatal thread which is trickling over the dyke — 
or worse, through some forgotten rat's hole in its side — 
hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult, without 
complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting 
the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's 
sake alone, but for the sake of their own year's labour 
and their own year's bread. The sheep have been 
driven off the land below ; the cattle stand ranged 
shivering on high dykes inland ; they will be saved in 
punts, if the worst befall. But a hundred spades, 
wielded by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat- 
hole. The trickle becomes a rush — the rush a roaring 
waterfall. The dyke-top trembles — gives. The men 
make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as of sailors in a 
wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf : but the bank 
will break; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but un- 
complaining ; beaten, but not conquered. A new cry 
rises among them. Up, to save yonder sluice ; that 
will save yonder lode ; that again yonder farm ; that 
again some other lode, some other farm, far back in- 
land, but guessed at instantly by men who have studied 
from their youth, as the necessity of their existence, 
the labyrinthine drainage of lands which are all below 
K K 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the water level, and where the inner lands, in many 
cases, are lower still than those outside. 

So they hurry away to the nearest farms ; the teams 
are harnessed, the waggons filled, and drawn down and 
emptied ; the beer-cans go round cheerily, and the men 
work with a sort of savage joy at being able to do 
something, if not all, and stop the sluice on which so 
much depends. As for the outer land, it is gone past 
hope ; through the breach pours a roaring salt cataract, 
digging out a hole on the inside of the bank, which 
remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come. 
Hundreds, thousands of pounds are lost already, past 
all hope. Be it so, then. At the next neap, perhaps, 
they will be able to mend the dyke, and pump the 
water out ; and begin again, beaten but not conquered, 
the same everlasting fight with wind and wave which 
their forefathers have waged for now 800 years. 

He who sees — as I have seen — a sight like that, will 
repine no more that the primseval forest is cut down, 
the fair mere drained. For instead of mammoth and 
urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle many times 
more numerous than all the wild venison of the pri- 
mseval jungle ; and produces crops capable of nourish- 
ing a hundred times as many human beings ; and more 
— it produces men a hundred times as numerous as 
ever it produced before; more healthy and long-lived 
— and if they will, . more virtuous and more happy — 



THE FENS. 



tkau ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, or holy hermit 
in his cell. So we, who knew the deep fen, will 
breathe one sigh over the last scrap of wilderness, and 
say no more ; content to know that — 

' The old order changeth, yielding place to new, 
And God fulfils himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' 



K 2 



IV. 
MY WINTER-GAKDEN. 



IV. 

MY WINTER GARDEN. J 

So, my friend : you ask me to tell you how I contrive 
to support this monotonous country life ; how, fond 
as I am of excitement, adventure, society, scenery, art, 
literature, I go cheerfully through the daily routine of a 
commonplace country profession, never requiring a six- 
weeks' holiday ; not caring to see the Continent, hardly 
even to spend a day in London ; having never yet 
actually got to Paris. 

You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round 
me, whose talk is of bullocks — as indeed mine is, often 
enough ; why I am not by this time ' all over blue 
mould ; ' why I have not been tempted to bury 
myself in my study, and live a life of dreams among 
old books. 

I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher : though 
one, thank Heaven, of a different stamp from him whom 
the great Bishop Berkeley silenced — alas ! only for 

1 Preiser's Magazine, January 1858. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



a while. 1 am possibly, after all, a man of small 
mind, content with small pleasures. So much the 
better for me. Meanwhile, I can understand your sur- 
prise, though you cannot understand my content. You 
have played a greater game than mine ; have lived a 
life, perhaps more fit for an Englishman ; certainly more 
in accordance with the taste of our common fathers, the 
Vikings, and their patron Odin ' the goer,' father of all 
them that go ahead. You have gone ahead, and over 
many lands ; and I reverence you for it, though I envy 
you not. You have commanded a regiment — indeed an 
army, and ' drank delight of battle with your peers ; ' 
you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judg- 
ment, like a noble Englishman as you are, old friend, 
among thousands who never knew before what justice 
and judgment were. You have tasted (and you have 
deserved to taste) the joy of old David's psalm, when he 
has hunted down the last of the robber lords of Pales- 
tine. You have seen ' a people whom you have not 
known, serve you. As soon as they heard of you, they 
obeyed you ; but the strange children dissembled with 
you : ' yet before you, too, ' the strange children failed, 
and trembled in their hill-forts/ 

Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done 
it ; and I do not wonder that to a man who has been 
set to such a task, and given power to carry it through, 
all smaller work must seem paltry ; that such a man's 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



very amusements, in that grand Indian land, and that 
free adventurous Indian life, exciting the imagination, 
calling out all the self-help and daring of a man, should 
have been on a par with your work ; that when you go 
a sporting, you ask for no meaner preserve than the 
primaeval forest, no lower park wall than the snow- 
peaks of the Himalaya. 

Yes ; you have been a ' burra Shikarree ' as well as 
a ' burra Sahib.' You have played the great game in 
your work, and killed the great game in your play. 
How many tons of mighty monsters have you done to 
death, since we two were schoolboys together, five-and- 
twenty years ago ? How many starving villages have 
you fed with the flesh of elephant or buffalo? How 
many have you delivered from man-eating tigers, or 
wary old alligators, their craws full of poor girls' ban- 
gles ? Have you not been charged by rhinoceroses, all 
but ript up by boars ? Have you not seen face to face 
Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheep — pri- 
maeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks on earth ? 
Your memories must be like those of Theseus and 
Hercules, full of slain monsters. Your brains must be 
one fossiliferous deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog 
and tiger, rhinoceros and elephant, lie heaped together, 
as the old ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs are heaped in 
the lias rocks at Lyme. And therefore I like to 
think of you. I try to picture your feelings to myself. 



138 PROSE IDYLLS. 

I spell over with my boy Mayne Eeid's amusing books, 
or the ' Old Forest Banger,' or Williams's old ' Tiger 
Book/ with Howitt's plates; and try to realize the 
glory of a burra Shikarree : and as I read and ima- 
gine, feel, with Sir Hugh Evans, ' a great disposition 
to cry.' 

For there were times, full many a year ago, when 
my brains were full of bison and grizzly bear, mustang 
and big-horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and hopes of wild 
adventure in the Far West, which I shall never see ; 
for ere I was three-and-twenty, I discovered, plainly 
enough, that my lot was to stay at home and earn my 
bread in a very quiet way ; that England was to be 
henceforth my prison or my palace, as I should choose 
to make it : and I have made it, by Heaven's help, 
the latter. 

I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats 
of youth, this little England — or rather, this little 
patch of moor in which I have struck roots as firm as 
the wild fir-trees do — looked at moments rather like a 
prison than a palace ; that my foolish young heart 
would sigh, ' Oh ! that I had wings ' — not as a dove, 
to fly. home to its nest and croodle there — but as an 
eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in a rampant 
and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look back 
as altogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the 
thirst for adventure and excitement was strong in me, 



MY WINTEBrGABDEN. 



as perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others 
went out to see the glorious new worlds of the West, 
the glorious old worlds of the East— why should not I ? 
Others rambled over Alps and Apennines, Italian pic- 
ture-galleries and palaces, filling their minds with fair 
memories — why should not I ? Others discovered new 
wonders in botany and zoology — why should not I ? 
Others too, like you, fulfilled to the utmost that strange 
lust after the burra shikar, which even now makes my 
pulse throb as often as I see the stags' heads in our 

friend A 's hall : why should not I ? It is not learnt 

in a day, the golden lesson of the Old Collect, to ' love 
the thing which is commanded, and desire that which is 
promised.' Not in a day : but in fifteen years one can 
spell out a little of its worth ; and when one finds 
one's self on the wrong side of forty, and the first 
grey hairs begin to show on the temples, and one can 
no longer jump as high as one's third button — scarcely, 
alas ! to any button at all ; and what with innumerable 
sprains, bruises, soakings, and chillings, one's lower 
limbs feel in a cold thaw much like an old post-horse's, 
why, one makes a virtue of necessity : and if one still 
lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for won- 
ders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the 
turf on the lawn and the brook in the park ; and with 
good Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one 
' Tour autour de mon jardin.' 



140 PROSE IDYLLS. 



For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of 
nature in every tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to 
see it, and can disabuse our minds of that tyrannous 
-phantom of size. Only recollect that great and small 
are but relative terms ; that in truth nothing is great 
or small, save in proportion to the quantity of creative 
thought which has been exercised in making it ; that 
the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons of Stone- 
henge, is in truth infinitely greater than all Stonehenge 
together, though he may measure the tenth of an inch, 
and the stone on which he sits five-and -twenty feet. 
You differ from me ? Be it so. Even if you prove me 
wrong I will believe myself in the right : I cannot afford 
to do otherwise. If you rob me of my faith in ' minute 
philosophy,' you rob me of a continual source of con- 
tent, surprise, delight. 

So go your way and I mine, each working with all 
his might, and playing with all his might, in his own 
place and way. Eemember only, that though I never 
can come round to your sphere, you must some day 
come round to me, when wounds, or weariness, or 
merely, as I hope, a healthy old age, shall shut you 
out for once and for all from burra shikar, whether 
human or quadruped. — For you surely will not take to 
politics in your old age ? You will not surely live to 
solicit (as many a fine fellow, alas ! did but last year) 
the votes, not even of the people, but merely of 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



the suobocracy, on the ground of your having neither 
policy nor principles, nor even opinions, upon any 
matter in heaven or earth ? — Then in that day will you 
he forced, my friend, to do what I have done this many 
a year; to refrain your soul, and keep it low. You 
will see more and more the depth of human ignorance, 
the vanity of human endeavours. You will feel more 
and more that the world is going God's way, and not 
yours, or mine, or any man's ; and that if you have 
been allowed to do good work on earth, that work is 
probably as different from what you fancy it as the 
tree is from the seed whence it springs. You will 
grow content, therefore, not to see the real fruit of 
your labours ; because if you saw it you would probably 
be frightened at it, and what is very good in the eyes 
of God would not be very good in yours ; content, 
also, to receive your discharge, and work and fight no 
more, sure that God is working and fighting, whether 
you are in hospital or in the field. And with this 
growing sense of the pettiness of human struggles will 
grow on you a respect for simple labours, a thankfulness 
for simple pleasures, a sympathy with simple people, 
and possibly, my trusty friend, with me and my little 
tours about that moorland which I call my winter- 
garden, and which is to me as full of glory and of in- 
struction as the Himalaya or the Punjab are to you 
and in which I contrive to find as much health and 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



amusement as I have time for — and who ought to 
have more ? 

I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in 
any legal sense (for only in a few acres have I a life 
interest), but in that higher sense in which ten thousand 
people can own the same thing, and yet no man's right 
interfere with another's. To whom does the Apollo 
Belvedere belong, but to all who have eyes to see its 
beauty ? So does my winter-garden ; and therefore to 
me among the rest. 

Besides (which is a gain to a poor man) my plea- 
sure in it is a very cheap one. So are all those of a 
minute philosopher, except his microscope. But my 
winter-garden, which is far larger, at all events, than 
that famous one at Chatsworth, costs me not one penny 
in keeping up. Poor, did I call myself ? Is it not true 
wealth to have all I want without paying for it ? Is it 
not true wealth, royal wealth, to have some twenty 
gentlemen and noblemen, nay, even royal personages, 
planting and improving for me ? Is it not more than 
royal wealth to have sun and frost, Gulf-stream and 
south-westers, laws of geology, phytology, physiology, 
and other ologies — in a word, the whole universe and 
the. powers thereof, day and night, paving, planting, 
roofing, lighting, colouring my winter-garden for me, 
without my even having the trouble to rub a magic 
ring and tell the genii to go to work ? 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. 
In the doings of our little country neighbourhood I 
find tragedy and comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too 
sad, to be written down. In the words of those whose 
talk is of bullocks, I find the materials of all possible 
metaphysic, and long weekly that I had time to work 
them out. In fifteen miles of moorland I find the 
materials of all possible physical science, and long that 
I had time to work out one smallest segment of that 
great sphere. How can I be richer, if I have lying at 
my feet all day a thousand times more wealth than I 
can use % 

Some people — most people — in these run-about rail- 
way days, would complain of such a life, in such a 
' narrow sphere,' so they call it, as monotonous. Very 
likely it is so. But is it to be complained of on that 
account ? Is monotony in itself an evil ? Which is 
better, to know many places ill, or to know one place 
well ? Certainly — if a scientific habit of mind be a 
gain — it is only by exhausting as far as possible the 
significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that 
sentence a true scientific one in its magniloquence ?) 
that you can discover any glimpse of the significance of 
the universal. Even men of boundless knowledge, like 
Humboldt, must have had once their speciality, their 
pet subject, or they would' have, strictly speaking, no 
knowledge at all. The volcanoes of Mexico, patiently 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



and laboriously investigated in his youth, were to 
Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole Cosmos. I 
learn more, studying over and over again the same 
Bagshot sand and gravel heaps, than I should by roam- 
ing all Europe in search of new geologic wonders. 
Fifteen years have I been puzzling at the same ques- 
tions and have only guessed at a few of the answers. 
What sawed out the edges of the moors into long 
narrow banks of gravel ? "What cut them off all flat 
atop? What makes Erica Tetralix grow in one soil, 
and the bracken in another? How did three species 
of Club-moss — one of them quite an Alpine one — get 
down here, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this 
isolated patch of gravel? Why did that one patch 
of Carex arenaria settle in the only square yard for 
miles and miles which bore sufficient resemblance to 
its native sandhill by the seashore, to make it comfort- 
able ? Why did Myosurus minimus, which I had hunted 
for in vain for fourteen years, appear by dozens in the 
fifteenth, upon a new-made bank, which had been for at 
least two hundred years a farm-yard gateway ? Why 
does it generally rain here from the south-west, not 
when the barometer falls, but when it begins to rise 
again ? Why — why is everything, which lies under 
my feet all day long ? I don't know ; and you can't 
tell me. And till I have found out, I cannot complain 
of monotony, with still undiscovered puzzles waiting 



MY WINTER-GAEDEX. 



to be explained, and so to create novelty at every 
turn. 

Besides, monotony is pleasant in itself; morally plea- 
sant, and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous : but 
there is much, I trust, to be said in favour of holy wed- 
lock. Living in the same house is monotonous: but 
three removes, say the wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomo- 
tion is regarded as an evil by our Litany. The Litany, 
as usual, is right. ' Those who travel by land or sea ' 
are to be objects of our pity and our prayers ; and I 
do pity them. I delight in that same monotony. It 
saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disappointment, and 
a host of bad passions. It gives a man the blessed, 
invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he has 
roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees ; and 
that only The Being who will do nothing cruel or useless 
can tear them up. It is pleasant to look down on the 
same parish day after day, and say, I know all that lies 
beneath, and all beneath know me. If I want a friend, 
I know where to find him ; if I want work done, I know 
who will do it. It is pleasant and good to -see the same 
trees year after year ; the same birds coming back in 
spring to the same shrubs ; the same banks covered 
with the same flowers, and broken (if they be stiff ones) 
by the same gaps. Pleasant and good it is to ride the 
same horse, to sit in the same chair, to wear the same 
old coat. That man who offered twenty pounds' reward 

K L 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a sage, and I 
wish I knew him. Why should one change one's place, 
any more than one's wife or one's children? Is a 
hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one strange shell 
into another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little 
better, either a dignified, safe, or graceful animal ? "No ; 
George Eiddler was a true philosopher. 

'Let Tules go sarching vur and nigh, 
"We bides at "Whum, my dog and I ; ' 

and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable ; 
for the oftener one sees, the better one knows ; and the 
better one knows, the more one loves. 

It is an easy philosophy ; especially in the case of the 
horse, where a man cannot afford more than one, as I 
cannot. To own a stud of horses, after all, is not to 
own horses at all, but riding-machines. Your rich man 
who rides Crimsea in the morning, Sir Guy in the after- 
noon, and Sultan to-morrow, and something else the next 
day, may be a very gallant rider : but it is a question 
whether he enjoys the pleasure which one horse gives 
to the poor man who rides him day after day; one 
horse, who is not a slave, but a friend; who has 
learnt all his tricks of voice, hand, heel, and knows 
what his master wants, even without being told ; who 
will bear with his master's infirmities, and feels secure 
that his master will bear with his in turn. 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour ; and were one 
rich, one would do even as the rich are wont to do : but 
still, I am a minute philosopher. And therefore, this 
afternoon, after I have done the same work, visited the 
same people, and said the same words to them, which I 
have done for years past, and shall, I trust, for many a 
year to come, I shall go wandering out into the same 
winter-garden on the same old mare ; and think the 
same thoughts, and see the same fir-trees, and meet 
perhaps the same good fellows hunting of their fox, as I 
have done with full content this many a year; and 
rejoice, as I said before, in my own boundless wealth, 
who have the whole universe to look at, without being 
charged one penny for the show. 

As I have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy 
the want of luxuries only because I cannot get them ; 
but if my self-deception be useful to me, leave it alone. 

No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent 
winter-garden at the Crystal Palace: yet let me, if I 
choose, prefer my own ; I argue that, in the first place, 
it is far larger. You may drive, I hear, through the 
grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You 
may ride through mine for fifteen miles on end. I 
prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph Paxton 
ever planned, that dome above my head some three 
miles high, of soft dappled grey and yellow cloud, 
through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue sky 

L 2 



148 PROSE IDYLLS. 



peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on yellow bogs, 
and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk ranges 
gleaming far away. But, above all, I glory in my 
evergreens. What winter-garden can compare for them 
with mine ? True, I have but four kinds — Scotch fir, 
holly, furze, and the heath ; and by way of relief to 
them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog- 
grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple 
tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fra- 
grant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well : 
in painting as in music, what effects are more grand 
than those produced by the scientific combination, in 
endless new variety, of a few simple elements ? Enough 
for me is the one purple birch ; the bright hollies round 
its stem sparkling with scarlet beads ; the furze-patch, 
rich with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, 
tipped here and there with a golden bud ; the deep soft 
heather carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream 
for hours ; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, 
and the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, 
against the soft grey sky. 

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation ? 
Well, I like it, outside and inside. I need no saw- 
edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with 
the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw- 
edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They 
are my Alps ; little ones it may be : but after all, as I 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 149 



asked before, what is size ? A phantom of o ur brain ; 
an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will consider 
wisely, consists in form, and not in size : and to the 
eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two 
inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of 
divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in 
the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see ? 
Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to 
see something more of what is to be seen; and you 
will find tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; 
mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every 
rabbit burrow : dark strids, tremendous cataracts, ' deep 
glooms and sudden glories,' in every foot-broad rill 
which wanders through the turf. All is there for you 
to see, if you will but rid yourself of ' that idol of 
space ; ' and Nature, as everyone will tell you who 
has seen dissected an insect under the microscope, is 
as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest 
forms. 

The March breeze is chilly : but I can be always 
warm if I like in my winter- garden. I turn my horse's 
head to the red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the 
furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there 
be no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no 
idols ; but endless vistas of smooth red green-veined 
shafts holding up the warm dark roof, lessening away 
into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle — 



150 PROSE IDYLLS. 



a carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty 
years. Eed shafts, green roof, and here and there a 
pane of blue sky — neither Owen Jones nor Willement 
can improve upon that ecclesiastical ornamentation, — 
while for incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine 
fragrance, far sweeter to my nostrils than the stifling 
narcotic odour which fills a Roman Catholic cathedral. 
There is not a breath of air within : but the breeze 
sighs over the roof above in a soft whisper. I shut 
my eyes and listen. Surely that is the murmur of the 
summer sea upon the summer sands in Devon far away. 
I hear the innumerable wavelets spend themselves 
gently upon the shore, and die away to rise again. And 
with the innumerable wave-sighs come innumerable 
memories, and faces which I shall never see again upon 
this earth. I will not tell even you of that, old friend. 

It has two notes, two keys rather, that Eolian-harp 
of fir-needles above my head ; according as the wind is 
east or west, the needles dry or wet. This easterly 
key of to-day is shriller, more cheerful, warmer in 
sound, though the day itself be colder : but grander 
still, as well as softer, is the sad soughing key in which 
the south-west 'wind roars on, rain-laden, over the 
forest, and calls me forth — being a minute philosopher 
— to catch trout in the nearest chalk-stream. 

The breeze is gone a while ; and I am in perfect 
silence — a silence which may be heard. Not a sound ; 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 151 

and not a moving object ; absolutely none. The 
absence of animal life is solemn, startling. That ring- 
dove, who was cooiug half a mile away, has hushed his 
moan; that flock of long-tailed titmice, which were 
twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few minutes ' 
since, are gone : and now there is not even a gnat to 
quiver in the slant sun-rays. Did a spider run over 
these dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his foot- 
fall. The creaking of the saddle, the soft step of the 
mare upon the fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem alone 
in a dead world. A dead w r orld : and yet so full of life, 
if I had eyes to see ! Above my head every fir-needle 
is breathing — breathing for ever ; currents unnumbered 
circulate in every bough, quickened by some undis- 
covered miracle ; around me every fir-stem is distilling 
strange juices, which no laboratory of man can make ; 
and where my dull eye sees only death, the eye of God 
sees boundless life and motion, health and use. 

Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the 
winter-garden, and meditate upon that one word — Life ; 
and specially on all that Mr. Lewes has written so well 
thereon — for instance — 



' We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification 
with Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises, 
must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surrounding 
world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latent with 
life ; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying thousands 
of years in those ' sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and smile forth 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it not a perpetual absorption 
of Nature, the identification of the individual with the universal? 
And may we not, in speculative moods, consider Death as the grand 
impatience of the soul to free itself from the circle of individual 
activity — the yearning of the creature to he united with the Creator ? 
' As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual life. In the 
early days of man's history, Nature and her marvellous ongoings were 
regarded with hut a casual and careless eye, or else with the merest 
wonder. It was late before profound and reverent study of her laws 
could wean man from impatient speculations ; and new, what is our 
intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough mental 
absorption of Nature ? When that absorption is completed, the mystic 
drama will be sunny clear, and all Nature's processes be visible to man, 
as a Divine Effluence and Life. ' 

True : yet not all the truth. But who knows all the 
truth ? 

Not I. ' We see through a glass darkly,' said St. 
Paul of old ; and what is more, dazzle and weary our 
eyes, like clumsy microscopists, by looking too long and 
earnestly through the imperfect and by no means achro- 
matic lens. Enough. I will think of something else. 
I will think of nothing at all 

Stay. There was a sound at last ; a light footfall. 

A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great 
bright eyes full of terror, her ears aloft to catch some 
sound behind. She sees us, turns short, and vanishes 
into the gloom. The mare pricks up her ears too, listens, 
and looks : but not the way the hare has gone. There 
is something more coming ; I can trust the finer sense of 
the horse, to which (and no wonder) the Middle Age 
attributed the power of seeing ghosts and fairies im- 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



palpable to man's gross eyes. Beside, that hare was 
not travelling in search of food. She was not loping 
along, looking around her right and left ; but galloping 
steadily. She has been frightened ; she has been put 
up : but what has put her up ? And there, far away 
among the fir-stems, rings the shriek of a startled black- 
bird. What has put him up ? 

That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes 
widen till they are ready to burst, and your ears are 
first shot forward towards your nose, and then laid back 
with vicious intent. Stand still, old woman ! Do you 
think still, after fifteen winters, that you can catch 
a fox? 

A fox it is indeed ; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir- 
stems between which he glides. And yet his legs are 
black with fresh peat-stains. He is a hunted fox : but 
he has not been up long. 

The mare stands like a statue : but I can feel her 
trembling between my knees. Positively he does not 
see us. He sits down in the middle of a ride, turns his 
great ears right and left, and then scratches one of them 
with his hind foot, seemingly to make it hear the better. 
Now he is up again and on. 

Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, 
or rather lieth, for it is on dead flat ground, the famous 
castle of Malepartus, which beheld the base murder of 
Lampe the hare, and many a seely soul beside. I 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



know it well ; a patch of sand-heaps, mingled with 
great holes, amid the twining fir-roots ; ancient home 
of the last of the wild beasts. And thither, unto 
Malepartus safe and strong, trots Eeinecke, where he 
hopes to be snug among the labyrinthine windings, and 
innumerable starting-holes, as the old apologue has it, 
of his ballium, covert-way, and donjon keep. Full 
blown in self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his toes deli- 
cately, and carrying his brush aloft, as full of cunning 
and conceit as that world-famous ancestor of his, whose 
deeds of unchivalry were the delight, if not the model, 
of knight and kaiser, lady and burgher, in the Middle 
Age. 

Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus ; 
examines it with his nose ; goes on to a postern ; exa- 
mines that also, and then another, and another ; while 
I perceive afar, projecting from every cave's mouth, the 
red and green end of a new fir-faggot. Ah, Eeinecke ! 
fallen is thy conceit, and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou 
hast worse foes to deal with than Bruin the bear, or 
Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish brute whom thy great 
ancestor outwitted. Man the many-counselled has been 
beforehand with thee ; and the earths are stopped. 

One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches 
those trusty counsellors, his ears, as if he would tear 
them off, ' revolving swift thoughts in a crafty mind.' 

He has settled it now. He is up and off — and at 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



what a pace ! Out of the way, Fauns and Hamadryads, 
if any be left in the forest. What a pace ! And with 
what a grace beside ! 

Oh Keinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite 
of thy great naughtiness. Art thou some fallen spirit, 
doomed to be hunted for thy sins in this life, and in 
some future life rewarded for thy swiftness, and grace, 
and cunning, by being made a very messenger of the 
immortals ? Who knows ? Not I. 

I am rising fast to Pistol's vein. Shall I ejaculate? 
Shall I notify? Shall I waken the echoes? Shall I 
break the grand silence by that scream which the vulgar 
view-halloo call ? 

It is needless ; for louder and louder every moment 
swells up a sound which makes my heart leap into my 
mouth, and my mare into the air. 

Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that 
thou wert here this day, and not in St. Martin's Hall, 
to hear that chorus, as it pours round the fir-stems, 
rings against the roof above, shatters up into a hun- 
dred echoes, till the air is live with sound ! You 
love madrigals, and whatever Weekes, or Wilbye, or 
Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So do I. Theirs is 
music fit for men : worthy of the age of heroes, of Drake 
and Ealeigh, Spenser and Shakspeare : but oh that you 
could hear this madrigal ! If you must have ' four 
parts,' then there they are. Deeped-mouthed bass, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



rolling along the ground ; rich joyful tenor ; wild wist- 
ful alto ; and leaping up here and there above the throng 
of sounds, delicate treble shrieks and trills of trembling 
joy. I know not whether you can fit it into your 
laws of music, any more than you can the song of that 
Ariel sprite who dwells in the Eolian harp, or the roar 
of the waves on the rock, or 

' Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn, 
And murmur of innumerable bees.' 

But music it is. A madrigal? Eather a whole 
opera of Der Freischutz — dsemoniac element and all — 
to judge by those red lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry 
voices ; and such as should make Eeinecke, had he 
strong aesthetic sympathies, well content to be hunted 
from his cradle to his grave, that such sweet sounds 
might by him enrich the air. Heroes of old were glad 
to die, if but some ' vates sacer ' would sing their fame 
in worthy strains : and shalt not thou too be glad, 
Eeinecke ? Content thyself with thy fate. Music 
soothes care ; let it soothe thine, as thou runnest for 
thy life ; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour. 
For as the Etruscans (says Athenaaus) were so luxurious 
that they used to flog their slaves to the sound of the 
flute, so shall luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweet- 
lips and Melody, eat thee to the sound of rich organ- 
pipes, that so thou mayest, 

' Like that old fabled swan, in music die.' 



MY WINDER-GARDEN. 



And now appear, dim at first and distant, but 
brightening and nearing fast, many a right good fellow 
and many a right good horse. I know three out of four 
of them, their private histories, the private histories of 
their horses : and could tell you many a good story of 
them : but shall not, being an English gentleman, and 
not an American litterateur. They may not all be 
very clever, or very learned, or very anything except 
gallant men ; but they are all good enough company 
for me, or anyone ; and each has his own speciality for 
which I like him. That huntsman I have known for 
fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his father's 
death-bed. I am godfather to that whip's child. I 
have seen the servants of the hunt, as I have the 
hounds, grow up round me for two generations, and 1 
feel for them as old friends ; and like to look into their 
brave, honest, weather-beaten faces. That red coat 
there, I knew him when he was a schoolboy ; and now 
he is a captain in the Guards, and won his Victoria 
Cross at Inkermann : that bright green coat is the best 
farmer, as well as the hardest rider, for many a mile 
round ; one who plays, as he works, with all his might, 
and might have been a beau sabreur and colonel of 
dragoons. So might that black coat, who now brews 
good beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of 
Guardians, and rides, like the green coat, as well as he 
works. That other black coat is a county banker ; but 



158 PUOSE IDYLLS. 



lie knows more of the fox than the fox knows of him- 
self, and where the hounds are, there will he be this 
day. That red coat has hunted kangaroo in Australia : 
that one, as clever and good as he is brave and simple, 
has stood by Napier's side in many an Indian fight : 
that one won his Victoria at Delhi, and was cut up at 
Lucknow, with more than twenty wounds : that one 
has — but what matter to you who each man is ? 
Enough that each can tell one a good story, welcome 
one cheerfully, and give one out here, in the wild 
forest, the wholesome feeling of being at home among 
friends. 

There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft 
tread of these hundred horse-hoofs upon the spongy 
vegetable soil. They are trotting now in ' common 
time.' You may hear the whole Croats' March (the 
finest trotting march in the world) played by those iron 
heels ; the time, as it does in the Croats' March, break- 
ing now and then, plunging, jingling, struggling through 
heavy ground, bursting for a moment into a jubilant 
canter as it reaches a sound spot. 

The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, 
puzzled by the windings of Eeinecke's footsteps. You 
can hear the flap and snort of the dogs' nostrils as they 
canter round ; and one likes it. It is exciting : but why 
— who can tell? 

What beautiful creatures they are, too ! Next to a 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 159 

Greek statue (I mean a real old Greek one ; for I am a 
thoroughly anti-preraphaelite benighted pagan heathen 
in taste, and intend some day to get up a Cinque-Cento 
Club, for the total abolition of Gothic art) — next to a 
Greek statue, I say, I know few such combinations of 
grace and strength as in a fine foxhound. It is the 
beauty of the Theseus — light and yet massive ; and 
light not in spite of its masses, but on account of the 
perfect disposition of them. I do not care for grace in 
man, woman, or animal, which is obtained (as in the 
old German painters) at the expense of honest flesh and 
blood. It may be all very pure, and unearthly, and 
saintly, and what not ; but it is not healthy ; and, there- 
fore, it is not really High Art, let it call itself such as 
much as it likes. The highest art must be that in 
which the outward is the most perfect symbol of the 
inward ; and, therefore, a healthy soul can be only 
exprest by a healthy body ; and starved limbs and a 
hydrocephalous forehead must be either taken as in- 
correct symbols of spiritual excellence, or as — what 
they were really meant for — symbols of certain spiritual 
diseases which were in the Middle Age considered as 
ecclesiastical graces and virtues. "Wherefore I like pagan 
and naturalist art; consider Titian and Correggio as 
unappreciated geniuses, whose excellences the world 
will in some saner mood rediscover; hold, in direct 
opposition to Rio, that Eafaelle improved steadily all 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



his life through, and that his noblest works are not 
his somewhat simpering Madonnas and somewhat 
impish Bambinos (very lovely though they are), but 
his greats coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons, which 
(with Andrea Mantegna's Heathen Triumph) Crom- 
well saved for the British nation. Probably no one 
will agree with all this for the next quarter of a 
century : but after that I have hopes. The world will 
grow tired of pretending to admire Manichsean pictures 
in an age of natural science ; and Art will let the dead 
bury their dead, and beginning again where Michael 
Angelo and Kafaelle left off, work forward into a nobler, 
truer, freer, and more divine school than the world has 
yet seen — at least, so I hope. 

And all this has grown out of those foxhounds. 
Why not ? Theirs is the sort of form which expresses 
to me what I want Art to express — Nature not limited, 
but developed, by high civilization. The old savage 
ideal of beauty was the lion, type of mere massive 
force. That was succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, 
say the fawn, type of delicate grace. By cunning 
breeding and choosing, through long centuries, man 
has combined both, and has created the foxhound, lion 
and fawn in one ; just as he might create noble human 
beings ; did he take half as much trouble about politics 
(in the true old sense of the word) as he does about 
fowls. Look at that old hound, who stands doubtful, 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 161; 

1 

looking up at his master for advice. Xook at the 
severity, delicacy, lightness of every curve. His head 
is finer than a deer's; his hind legs tense as steel 
springs ; his fore-legs straight as arrows : and yet see 
the depth of chest, the sweep of loin, the breadth of 
paw, the mass of arm and thigh ; and if you have an 
eye for form, look at the absolute majesty of his atti- 
tude at this moment. Majesty is the only word for it. 
If he were six feet high, instead of twenty-three inches, 
with what animal on earth could you compare him? 
Is it not a joy to see such a thing alive ? It is to me, 
at least. I should like to have one in my study all 
day long, as I would have a statue or a picture ; and 
when Mr. Morrell gave (as they say) two hundred 
guineas for Hercules alone, I believe the dog was well 
worth the money, only to look at. But I am a minute 
philosopher. 

I cap them on to the spot at which Eeinecke dis- 
appeared. Old Virginal's stern -flourishes ; instantly 
her pace quickens. One whimper, and she is away full- 
mouthed through the wood, and the pack after her: 
but not I. 

I am not going with them. My hunting days are 
over. Let it suffice that I have, in the days of my 
vanity, ' drank delight of battle with my peers, far 
on the ringing plains ' of many a county, grass and 
forest, down and vale. No, my gallant friends. You 

K M. 



162 PROSE IDYLLS. 



know that I could ride, if I chose ; and I am vain 
enough to be glad that yon know it. But useless are 
your coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right 
hands. - Life,' as my friend Tom Brown says, ' is 
not all beer and skittles ; ' it is past two now, and I 
have four old women to read to at three, and an old 
man to bury at four ; and I think, on the whole, that 
you will respect me the more for going home and 
doing my duty. That I should like to see this fox 
fairly killed, or even fairly lost, I deny not. That I 
should like it as much as I can like any earthly and 
outward thing, I deny not. But sugar to one's bread 
and butter is not good ; and if my winter-garden 
represent the bread and butter, then will fox-hunting 
stand to it in the relation of superfluous and unwhole- 
some sugar : so farewell ; and long may your noble 
sport prosper — ' the image of war with only half its 
danger,' to train you and your sons after, into gallant 
soldiers — full of 

' The reason firm, the temperate will, 
Endurance, foresight, strength and skill. ' 

So homeward I go through a labyrinth of fir-stems 
and, what is worse, fir-stumps, which need both my 
eyes and my horse's at every moment ; and woe to the 
' anchorite,' as old Bunbury names him, who carries his 
nose in the air, and his fore feet well under him. Woe 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



to the self-willed or hard-hided horse who cannot take 
the slightest hint of the heel, and wince hind legs or 
fore out of the way of those jagged points which lie in 
wait for him. Woe, in fact, to all who are clumsy or 
cowardly, or in anywise not ' masters of the situation.' 
Pleasant riding it is, though, if you dare look any- 
where but over your horse's nose, under the dark roof, 
between the red fir-pillars, in that rich subdued light. 
Now I plunge into a gloomy dell, wherein is no tink- 
ling rivulet, ever pure; but instead a bog, hewn out 
into a chess-board of squares, parted by deep narrow 
ditches some twenty feet apart. Blundering among the 
stems I go, fetlock-deep in peat, and jumping at every 
third stride one of the said uncanny gripes, half hidden 
in long hassock grass. Oh Aira coespitosa, most stately 
and most variable of British grasses, why will you 
always grow where you are not wanted ? Through you 
the mare all but left her hind legs in that last gripe. 
Through you a red-coat ahead of me, avoiding one of 
your hassocks, jumped with his horse's nose full butt 
against a fir-stem, and stopped, 

' As one that is struck dead 
By lightning, ere he falls,' 

as we shall soon, in spite of the mare's cleverness. 
Would we were out of this ! 

Out of it we shall be soon. I see daylight ahead at 

m 2 



164 PROSE IDYLLS. 



last, bright between the dark stems. Up a steep slope, 
and over a bank which is not very big, but being com- 
posed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with 
me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, 
and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and 
out on the open moor. 

Grand old moor ! stretching your brown flats right 
away toward Windsor for many a mile. — Far to our 
right is the new Wellington College, looking stately 
enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite of its 
two ugly towers and pinched waist. Close over me 
is the long fir-fringed ride of Easthampstead, ending 
suddenly in Caesar's camp ; and hounds and huntsmen 
are already far ahead, and racing up the Eoman road, 
which the clods of these parts, unable to give a better 
account of it, call the Devil's Highway. 

Eacing indeed ; for as Eeinecke gallops up the nar- 
row heather-fringed pathway, he brushes off his scent 
upon the twigs at every stride; and the hounds race 
after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, for 
convenience, in one long line upon the track : but going 
heads up, sterns down, at a pace which no horse can 
follow. — I only hope they may not overrun the scent. 

They have overrun it ; halt, and put their heads down 
a moment. But with one swift cast in full gallop they 
have hit it off again, fifty yards away in the heather, 
long ere the horsemen are up to them ; for those hounds 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves, 
and so have learnt to trust themselves, and act for 
themselves ; as boys should learn at school, even at the 
risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing head 
indeed, down a half-cleared valley, and over a few 
ineffectual turnips withering in the peat, a patch of 
growing civilization in the heart of the wilderness ; and 
then over the brook, while I turn slowl}'- away, through 
a green wilderness of self-sown firs. 

There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, 
colonizing the desert in spite of frost, and gales, and 
barrenness ; and clustering together, too, as Scotsmen 
always do abroad, little and big, every one under his 
neighbour's lee, according to the good old proverb of 
their native land, ' Caw me, and I'll caw thee.' 

I respect them, those Scotch firs. I" delight in their 
forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in 
Bramshill Park — the only place in England where a 
painter can learn what Scotch firs are — down to the 
little green pyramids which stand up out of the 
heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange 
woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an 
average have most of them spent in ineffectual efforts 
to become a foot high. Nibbled off by hares, trodden 
down by cattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing 
hundreds of their brethren cut up and carried off 
in the turf-fuel, they are as gnarled and stubbed near 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the ground as an old thorn-bush in a pasture. But 
they have conquered at last, and are growing away, 
eighteen inches a year, with fair green brushes silver- 
tipt, reclothing the wilderness with a vegetation which 
it has not seen for — how many thousand years ? 

ISTo man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was 
indigenous to England, and, mixed with the larch, 
stretched in one vast forest from Norfolk into "Wales, 
England was not as it is now. Snowdon was, it may 
be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the edges 
of its glaciers the marmot and the musk ox, the elk 
and the bear, wandered down into the Lowlands, and 
the hyena and the lion dwelt in those caves where fox 
and badger only now abide. And how did the Scotch 
fir die out ? Did the whole land sink slowly from its 
sub- Alpine elevation into a warmer climate below ? Or 
was it never raised at all ? Did some change of the 
Atlantic sea-floor turn for the first time the warm Gulf 
Stream to these shores ; and with its soft sea-breezes 
melt away the ' Age of Ice,' till glaciers and pines, 
marmots and musk oxen, perspired to death, and 
vanished for an aeon ? Who knows ? Not I. But 
of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether, as we 
hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was re-introduced 
by James the First when he built Bramshill for 
Ealeigh's hapless pet, Henry the Prince, or whatever 
may have been the date of their re-introduction, here 






MY WINTER-GARDEK. 107 

they are, and no one can turn them out. In countless 
thousands the winged seeds float down the south-west 
gales from the older trees ; and every seed which falls 
takes root in ground which, however unable to bear 
broad-leaved trees, is ready by long rest for the seeds of 
the needle-leaved ones. Thousands perish yearly ; but 
the eastward march of the whole, up hill and down 
dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus' Goths in 
Goethe's Helena : — 

' Eili lang und breites Volksgewicht, 
Dor erste wusste vom letzen nicht. 

Der erste fie], der zweite stand, 
Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand, 

Ein jeder hundertfach gestarkt ; 
Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt — — 

— till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, 
stretching to the eastward of each tract of older trees, 
a long cloud of younger ones, like a green comet's tail 
— I wish their substance was as yielding this day. 
Truly beautiful — grand indeed to me it is — to see 
young live Nature thus carrying on a great savage pro- 
cess in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial 
English land ; and reproducing here, as surely as in the 
Australian bush, a native forest, careless of mankind. 
Still, I wish it were easier to ride through. Stiff are 
those Scotchmen, and close and stout they stand by 
each other, and claw at you as you twist through them, 



168 PROSE IDYLLS. 



the biggest alining at your head, or even worse, at your 
knees ; while the middle-sized slip their brushes between 
your thigh and the saddle, and the little babies tickle 
your horse's stomach, or twine about his fore-feet. 
Whish — whish ; we are enveloped in what seems an 
atmosphere of scrubbing-brushes. Fain would I shut 
my eyes : but dare not, or I shall ride against a tree. 
Whish — whish ; alas for the horse which cannot wind 
and turn like a hare! Plunge — stagger. What is 
this ? A broad line of ruts ; perhaps some Celtic track- 
way, two thousand years old, now matted over with firs ; 
dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only 
masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but 
doubly dangerous now when masked by dark under- 
growth. You must find your own way here, mare. I 
will positively have nothing to do with it. I disclaim 
all responsibility. There are the reins on your neck ; 
do what you will, only do something — and if you can, 
get forward, and not back. 

There is daylight at last, and fresh air. . I trot con- 
temptuously through the advanced skirmishers of the 
Scotch invading army; and watch my friends some 
mile and a half off, who have threaded a practicable 
trackway through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet 
for firs to root in, and are away in ' a streamer.' Now 
a streamer is produced in this wise. There is but one 
possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook ; 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



one possible path in a cover ; and as each man has to 
wait till the man before him gets through, and then 
gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on 
the man before him : wherefore, by all laws of known 
arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the 
last of the ten find himself two hundred yards behind 
the foremost, which process several times repeated, pro- 
duces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. twenty 
men galloping absurdly as hard as they can, in a line 
half a mile long, and in humours which are celestial 
in the few foremost, contented in the central, and 
gradually becoming darker in the hindmost ; till in 
the last man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. 
Farewell, brave gentlemen! I watch, half sadly, half 
self-contented, the red coats scattered like sparks of 
fire over hill and dale, and turn slowly homeward, to 
visit my old women. 

I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, 
planted with rows of oaks, surrounded by trim sunny 
cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilder- 
ness. Across the village cricket-ground — we are great 
cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old 
game live among us ; and then up another hollow lane, 
which leads between damp shaughs and copses toward 
the further moor. 

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these 
same hollow lanes. They set him on archaeological 



170 PROSE IDYLLS. 



questions, more than he can solve ; and I meditate as I 
go, how many centuries it took to saw through the warm 
sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he trots, 
with the oak boughs meeting over his head. Was it 
ever worth men's while to dig out the soil? Surely 
not. The old method must have been, to remove the 
softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground ; 
and then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the 
rains and the wheels of generations sawed it gradually 
deeper and deeper, till this road-ditch was formed. But 
it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these 
hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must be 
as old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire I am 
sure that they are. But there many of them, one sus- 
pects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice pre- 
pense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking 
animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of 
banks and hill-sides ; while your bold Eoman made his 
raised roads straight over hill and dale, as ' ridge-ways ' 
from which, as from an eagle's eyrie, he could survey 
the conquered lowlands far and wide. It marks strongly 
the difference between the two races, that difference 
between the Boman paved road with its established 
common way for all passengers, its regular stations and 
milestones, and the Celtic trackway winding irresolutely 
along in innumerable ruts, parting to meet again, as if 
each savage (for they were little better) had taken his 



MY WINTEll-GARDEX. 171 

own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts too 
heavy for his cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor 
I have seen many ancient roads, some of them long 
disused, which could have been hollowed out for no 
other purpose hut that of concealment. 

So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath 
me like a long green garden between its two banks of 
brown moor ; and on through a cheerful little green, 
with red brick cottages scattered all round, each with 
its large neat garden, and beehives, and pigs and geese, 
and turf-stack, and clipt yews and hollies before the 
door, and rosy dark-eyed children, and all the simple 
healthy comforts of a wild 'heth- cropper's' home. When 
he can, the good man of the house works at farm 
labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce, 
he cuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a 
little poaching. True, he seldom goes to church, save 
to be christened, married, or buried : but he equally 
seldom gets drunk. For church and public stand to- 
gether two miles off; so that social wants sometimes 
bring their own compensations with them, and there 
are two sides to every question. 

Hark ! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. 
And then another, and another. My friends may 
trust it; for the clod of these parts delights in the 
chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts away 
flail and fork wildly, to run, shout, assist, and in- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



terfere in all possible ways, out of pure love.- The 
descendant of many generations of broom-squires and 
deer-stealers, the instinct of sport is strong within him 
still, though no more of the king's deer are to be 
shot in the winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an 
apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He 
now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and 
too probably once in his life, ' hits the keeper into the 
river,' and reconsiders himself for a while after over a 
crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults ; 
and I have mine. But he is a thorough good fellow 
nevertheless ; quite as good as I : civil, contented, in- 
dustrious, and often very handsome ; and a far shrewder 
fellow too— owing to his dash of wild forest blood, 
from gipsy, highwayman, and what not — than his bullet- 
headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South-Saxon 
of the Chalk-downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and 
tall of bone; swaggering in his youth; but when he 
grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and 
courteous as a prince. Sixteen years have I lived with 
him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude 
word or action from him. 

With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and 
be buried by his side; and to him I go home con- 
tented, to look after his petty interests, cares, sorrows — 
Petty, truly — seeing that they include the whole primal 
mysteries of life— Food, raiment, and work to earn them 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 173 

withal ; love raid marriage, birth and death, right 
doing and wrong doing, ' Schicksal und eigene Schnld ; ' 
and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the 
eyes of a minute philosopher are most divine, because 
they are most commonplace — catholic as the sunshine 
and the rain which come down from the Heavenly 
Father, alike upon the evil and the good. As for 
doing fine things, my friend, with you, I have learnt 
to believe that I am not set to do fine things, simply 
because I am not able to do them ; and as for seeing 
fine things, with you, I have learnt to see the sight — 
as well as to try to do the duty — which lies nearest me ; 
and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I make 
good use of my eyes and brain in this life, I shall see — 
if it be of any use to me — all the fine things, or per- 
haps finer still, in the life to come. But if not — what 
matter ? In any life, in any state, however simple or 
humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy a 
Minute Philosopher ; and if a man be busy, and busy 
about his duty, what more does he require, for time 
or for eternity? 



V. 
FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



V. 

FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 

The point from which to start, in order best to appre- 
ciate the change from ocean to sea, is perhaps Biarritz. 
The point at which to stop is Cette. And the change 
is important. Between the two points races are 
changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the 
very plants under your feet are changed, from a 
Western to an Eastern type. You pass from the 
wild Atlantic into the heart of the Eoman Empire — 
from the influences which formed the discoverers of the 
New "World, to those which formed the civilizers of the 
Old. Gascony, not only in its scenery, hut in its very 
legends, reminds you of Devon and Cornwall; Lan- 
guedoc of Greece and Palestine. 

In the sea, as was to be expected, the change is even 

more complete. From Biarritz to Cette, you pass from 

poor Edward Eorbes's Atlantic to his Mediterranean 

centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether 

K N 



178 PROSE IDYLLS. 



you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the 
region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to 
that of tunnies, scisenas, dorados, and all the gorgons, 
hydras, and chirnaeras dire, which are said to grace the 
fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles. 

But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, 
there are exceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of 
the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, 
and, once in the Bay of Biscay, find the feeding good 
and the wind against them, and stay there. 

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardere's hotel at 
Biarritz (he has seen service in England, and knows 
our English ways), you may have at dinner, day after 
day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny. 
The first is unknown to the Mediterranean ; for Fluellen 
mistook when he said that there were salmons in 
Macedon, as well as Monmouth ; the louvine is none 
other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the Atlantic ; 
the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) 
is a gigantic herring which comes up rivers to spawn ; 
a fish common (with slight differences) to both sides of 
the North Atlantic ; while the sardine, the dorado, and 
the tunny (whether he be the true tunny or the Ala- 
longa) are Mediterranean fish. 

The whale fishery of these shores is long extinct. 
The Biscay an whale was supposed to be extinct like- 
wise. But like the ibex, and some other animals 



FTIOM OCEAN TO SEA. 



which man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that 
he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. 
For in 1854 one was washed ashore near St. Jean de 
Luz, at news whereof Eschricht, the great Danish natu- 
ralist, travelled night and day from Copenhagen, and 
secured the skeleton of the new-old monster. 

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and 
on — if I recollect aright — into the seventeenth century, 
Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent 
forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew all the whales 
of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to 
attack those of the frozen North. 

British and American enterprise drove them from the 
West coast of the Atlantic ; and now their descendants 
are content to stay at home and take the sardine-shoals, 
and send them in to Bayonne on their daughters' heads. 

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to 
meet a party of those fisher-girls, bare-legged, high- 
kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at a long loping pace, up 
the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket on 
her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black 
hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the 
enjoyment of life. Pretty enough. And yet who will 
blame the rail, which now sends her quickly into 
Bayonne — or even her fish without her; and relieves 
the fair young ma i wen from being degraded into a 
beast of burden ? 

s 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Handsome folk are these brown Basques. A myste- 
rious people, who dwell alone, and are not counted among 
the nations ; speaking an unique language, and keeping 
up unique customs, for which the curious must consult 
M. Michel's interesting book. There may be a cross of 
English blood among them, too, about Biarritz and 
Bayonne; English features there are, plainly to be 
seen. And whether or not, one accepts the story of the 
country, that Anglets, near by, is an old English colony 
left by our Black Prince, it is certain that Bayonne 
Cathedral was built in part by English architects, and 
carries the royal arms of Eugland ; and every school 
history will tell us how this corner of Erance was long 
in our hands, and was indeed English long before it 
was properly French. Moorish blood there may be, 
too, here and there, left behind by those who built the 
little ' atalaya ' or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to 
correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of 
similar beacons down the Spanish coast. The Basques 
resemble in look the Southern Welsh — quick-eyed, 
neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and 
women, beautiful. The men wear a fiat Scotch cap of 
some bright colour, and call it ' berretta.' The women 
tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel 
one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a 
triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof 
the lady seems to think herself well dressed. But 






FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



the pretty Basque handkerchief will soon give place 
to the Parisian bonnet. For every cove among the 
rocks is now filled with smart bathing-houses, from 
which, in summer, the gay folk of Paris issue in 
'costume de bain,' to float about all day on cala- 
bashes — having literally no room for the soles of their 
feet on land. Then are opened casinos, theatre, 
shops, which lie closed all the winter. Then do the 
Basque house-owners flee into the moors, and camp 
out (it is said) on the hills all night, letting their 
rooms for ten francs a night as mere bed-chambers — 
for all eating and living is performed in public ; 
while the dove-coloured oxen, with brown holland 
pinafores over their backs, who dawdle in pairs up 
and down the long street with their light carts, have 
to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois 
de Boulogne. 

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to 
see and to love: but in the winter, when a little 
knot of quiet pleasant English hold the place against 
all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion, about 
the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges — 
and watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan 
surges, the trim walks and summer-houses, which 
were erected by the municipality in honour of the 
Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, and 
yearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



graven away, and what must have been once a long 
promontory becomes a group of fantastic pierced rocks, 
exactly like those which are immortalized upon the 
willow-pattern plates. 

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz 
are very barren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there 
is one remarkable exception, where the pools worn in a 
hard limestone are filled with what seem at first sight 
beds of china- asters, of all loveliest colours — primrose, 
sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey. They 
are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus livi- 
dus, which is found in similar places in the west of 
Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole 
which he has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an 
overhanging lip of living lime — seemingly a Nullipore 
coralline. What they do there, what they think of, or 
what food is brought into their curious grinding-mills 
by the Atlantic surges which thunder over them twice 
a day, who can tell ? However they form, without 
doubt, the most beautiful object which I have ever 
seen in pool or cove. 

But the glory of Biarritz, after all, is the moors 
above, and the view to be seen therefrom. Under 
blazing blue skies, tempered by soft dappled cloud, 
for ever sliding from the Atlantic and the Asturias 
mountains, in a climate soft as milk, and exhilarating 
withal as wine, one sees far and wide a panorama 



FROM QUE AX TO SEA. 



which, from its variety as well as its beauty, can 
never weary. 

To the north, the long sand-line of the Biscayan 
shore-*-the bar of the Adour marked by a cloud of 
grey spray. Then the dark pine-fiats of the Landes, 
and the towers of Bayonne rising through rich woods. 
To the eastward lies a high country, furred with woods, 
broken with glens ; a country exactly like Devon, 
through the heart of which, hidden in such a gorge 
as that of Dart or Taw, runs the swift stream of the 
Nive, draining the western Pyrenees, And beyond, 
to the south-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows 
gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds. As one 
turns southward, the mountains break down into brown 
heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors. The two 
nearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Bhune 
and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath 
and crags, hundreds of unburied bones. For those 
great hills, skilfully fortified by Soult before the 
passage of the Bidassoa, were stormed, yard by yard, 
by Wellington's army in October 181.3. That mighty 
deed must be read in the pages of one who saw it 
with his own eyes, and fought there with his own noble 
body, and even nobler spirit. It is not for me to tell 
of victories, of which Sir William Napier has already 
told. 

Towards that hill, and the Nivelle at its foot, the 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



land slopes down, still wooded and broken, bounded 
by a long sweep of clayey crumbling cliff. The eye 
catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of the Nivelle — 
once Wellington's sea-base for his great Frencji cam- 
paign. Then Fontarabia, at the Bidassoa mouth; and 
far off, the cove within which lies the fatal citadel 
of St. Sebastian ; all backed up by the fantastic 
mountains of Spain ; the four-horned " Quatre Cou- 
ronnes," the pyramidal Jaysquivel, and beyond them 
again, sloping headlong into the sea, peak after peak, 
each one more blue and tender than the one before, 
leading the eye on and on for seemingly countless 
leagues, till they die away into the ocean horizon and 
the boundless west. Not a sail, often for days together, 
passes between those mountains and the shore on 
which we stand, to break the solitude, and peace, 
and vast expanse ; and we linger, looking and looking 
at we know not what, and find repose in gazing 
purposeless into the utter void. 

Very unlike France are these Basque uplands ; very 
like the seaward parts of Devon and Cornwall. Large 
oak-copses and boggy meadows fill the glens; while 
above, the small fields, with their five-barred gates 
(relics of the English occupation) and high furze and 
heath-grown banks, make you fancy yourself for a 
moment in England. And the illusion is strengthened, 
as you see that the heath of the banks is the Goonhilly 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



heath of the Lizard Point, and that of the bogs the 
orange-belled Erica ciliaris, which lingers (though rare) 
both in Cornwall and in the south of Ireland. But 
another glance undeceives you. The wild flowers are 
new, saving those cosmopolitan seeds (like nettles and 
poppies) which the Eomans have carried all over 
Europe, and the British are now carrying over the 
world. Every sandy bank near the sea is covered with 
the creeping stems of a huge reed, which grows in 
summer tall enough to make not only high fences, 
but fishing-rods. Poverty (though there is none of 
what we call poverty in Britain) fills the little walled 
court before its cottage with bay trees and standard 
figs ; while wealth (though there is nothing here of 
what we call wealth in Britain) asserts itself uniformly 
by great standard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, 
in full bloom here in April instead of — as with us — 
in July. Both on bank and in bog grow Scorzoneras 
(dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there 
are none in these isles; and every common is ablaze 
with strange and lovely flowers. Each dry spot is 
brilliant with the azure flowers of a prostrate Litho- 
spermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvel why 
we do not see it, as ' spring-bedding,' in every British 
garden. The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the 
large white flowers and trailing stems of the sage- 
leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. 
And here and there among furze and heath, crop out 
great pink bunches of the Daphne Cneorum of our 
gardens, perfuming all the air. Yes, we are indeed 
in foreign parts, in the very home of that Atlantic 
flora, of which only a few species have reached the 
south-west of these isles; and on the limit of another 
flora also — of that of Italy and Greece. For as we 
descend into the glen, every lane-bank and low 
tree is entwined, not with ivy, but with a still 
more beautiful evergreen, the Smilax of South-eastern 
Europe, with its zigzag stems, and curving heart- 
shaped leaves, and hooked thorns ; the very oak-scrub 
is of species unknown to Britain. And what are 
these tall lilies, which fill every glade breast-high with 
their sword-like leaves, and spires of white flowers, 
lilac-pencilled ? They are the classic flower, the 
Asphodel of Greece and Grecian song; the Asphodel 
through which the ghosts of Homer's heroes strode: 
as heroes' ghosts might stride even here. 

For here we are on sacred ground. The vegetation 
is rank with the blood of gallant invaders, and of no 
less gallant patriots. In the words of Campbell's 
' Hohenlinden ' — 

' Every turf beneath our feet 
May be a hero's sepulchre.' 

That little tarn below has 'bubbled with crimson 



FEOM OCEAN TO SEA. 



foam ' when the kings of Europe arose to bring home 
the Bourbons, as did the Lake Eegillus of old, in the 
day when 'the Thirty Cities swore to bring the 
Tarquins home.' 

Turn to the left, above the tarn, and into the great 
Spanish road from Bayonne to the frontier at what 
was lately 'La Negresse,' but is now a gay railway 
station. Where that station is, was another tarn, 
now drained. The road ran between the two. And 
that narrow space of two hundred yards, on which 
we stand, was for three fearful days the gate of 
France. 

For on the 10th of December, 1813, Soult, driven 
into Bayonne by Wellington's advance, rushed out 
again in the early morn, and poured a torrent of 
living men down this road, and upwards again towards 
the British army which crested that long ridge in 
front. 

The ridge slopes rapidly away at the back, toward 
the lowlands of the Bidassoa; and once thrust from 
it, the English army would have been cut in two — 
one half driven back upon their sea- base at St. Jean 
de Luz : the other half left on the further side of 
the Adour. 

And this was the gate, which had to be defended 
during a three days' battle. That long copse which 
overhangs the road is the famous wood, which was 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



taken and retaken many times. Yon house above 
it, embowered in trees, is the ' Mayor's house,' in 
which Sir John Hope was so nearly captured by the 
French. Somewhere behind the lane where we came 
down was the battery which blasted off our troops 
as they ran up from the lowlands behind, to support 
their fellows. 

Of the details of the fight you must read in Napier's 
'Peninsular War,' and in Mr. Gleig's 'Subaltern.' 
They are not to be described by one who never saw 
a battle, great or small. 

And now, if you choose to start upon your journey 
from the ocean to the sea, you will take the railroad 
here, and run five miles through the battle-fields into 
Bayonne, the quaint old fortress city, girdled with a 
labyrinth of walls, and turf-dykes, and outside them 
meadows as rich, and trees as stately, as if war had 
never swept across the land. You may stop, if you 
will, to look at the tall Spanish houses, with their 
piazzas and jalousies, and the motley populace, French, 
Basques, Spaniards, Jews; and, most worth seeing of 
all, the lovely ladies of Bayonne, who swarm out 
when the sun goes down, for air and military music. 
You may try to find (in which you will probably fail) 
the arms of England in the roof of the ugly old 
cathedral ; you may wander over the bridges which 
join the three quarters of the city (for the Adour and 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



the Nive meet within the walls), and probably lose 
your way — a slight matter among folk who, if you 
will but take off your hat, call them Monsieur, 
apologize for the trouble you are giving, begin the 
laugh at your own stupidity, and compliment them 
on their city and their fair ladies, will be delighted 
to walk a mile out of their own way to show you 
yours. You will gaze up at the rock-rooted citadel 
from whence, in the small hours of April 14, 1813, 
after peace was agreed on, but unhappily not declared 
(for Napier has fully exculpated the French Generals), 
three thousand of Thouvenot's men burst forth against 
Sir John Hope's unsuspecting besiegers, with a furious 
valour which cost the English more than 800 men. 

There, in the pine woods on the opposite side, is the 
Boucault, where our besieging army lay. Across the 
reach below stretched Sir John Hope's famous bridge ; 
and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you run beneath 
the English cemetery, where lie the soldiers (officers 
of the Coldstream Guards among them) who fell in 
the Frenchman's last struggle to defend his native 
land. 

But enough of this. I should not have recalled to 
mind one of these battles, had they not, one and all, 
been as glorious for the French and their great captain 
— wearied with long marches, disheartened by the 
apathy of their own countrymen, and, as they went on, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



overpowered by mere numbers — as they were for our 
veterans, and Wellington himself. 

And now, once through Bayonne, we ave in the 
Pignadas and the Landes. 

To form a conception of these famous Landes, it is 
only necessary to run down by the South- Western 
Eailway, through the moors of Woking or Ascot ; 
spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming 
infinity. The same sea of brown heather, broken only 
by the same dark pignadas, or fir plantations, extends 
for nigh a hundred miles ; and when the traveller 
northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish moun- 
tains, and then of the Pyrenean snows, he seems to be 
rushing along a brown ocean, without wave or shore. 
Only, instead of the three heaths of Surrey and Hants 
'the same species as those of Scotland), larger and 
richer southern heaths cover the grey sands ; and 
notably the delicate upright spires of the bruyere, or 
Erica scojiaria, which grows full six feet high, and 
furnishes from its roots those 'bruyere' pipes, which 
British shopkeepers have rechristened ' briar-roots.' 
Instead, again, of the Scotch firs of Ascot, the pines 
are all pinasters (miscalled P. maritima). Each has 
ihe same bent stem, carrying at top, long, ragged, 
scanty, leaf-tufts, instead of the straight stem and 
dense short foliage of the sturdier Scotchman; and 
down each stem runs a long, fresh scar, and at the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



bottom (in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a 
neat earthen pipkin, into which distils turpentine as 
clear as glass. The trees have mostly been planted 
within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands 
from being blown away. As timber they are about as 
valuable as those Jersey cow-cabbage stalks, of which 
the curious will at times make walking-sticks : but as 
producers of turpentine they have their use, and give 
employment to the sad, stunted, ill-fed folk, unhealthy 
for want of water, and barbarous from utter loneliness, 
whose only employment, in old times, was the keeping 
ragged flocks about the moors. Few and far between 
the natives may be seen from the railway, seemingly 
hung high in air, till on nearer approach you find them 
to be stalking along on stilts, or standing knitting on 
the same, a sheepskin over their shoulders, an umbrella 
strapped to their side, and, stuck into the small of the 
back, a long crutch, which serves, when resting, as a 
third wooden leg. 

So run on the Landes, mile after mile, station after 
station, varied only by an occasional stunted cork tree, 
ot a starved field of barley or maize. But the railroad 
is bringing to them, as elsewhere, labour, civilization, 
agricultural improvement. Pretty villages, orchards, 
gardens, are springing up round the lonely ' gares ' 
The late Emperor helped forward, it is said, new pine 
plantations, and sundry schemes for reclaiming the 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



waste. Arcachon, on a pine-fringed lagoon of the 
Atlantic, has great artificial ponds for oyster breeding, 
and is rising into a gay watering-place, with a dis- 
tinguished scientific society. Nay, more : it saw a few 
years since an international exposition of fish, and fish- 
culture, and fishing-tackle, and all things connected 
with the fisheries, not only of Europe, but of America 
likewise. Heaven speed the plan ; and restore thereby 
oysters to our shores, and shad and salmon to the 
rivers both of Western Europe and Eastern North 
America. 

As for the cause of the Landes, it may be easily 
divined, by the help of a map and of common sense. 

The Gironde and the Adour carry to the sea the 
drainage of nearly a third of France, including almost 
all the rain which falls on the north side of the 
Pyrenees. What has become of all tlie sand and mud 
which has been swept in the course of ages down their 
channels ? What has become — a very small part, be it 
recollected, of the whole amount — of all the rock which 
has been removed by rain and thunder, frost and snow, 
in the process of scooping out the deep valleys of the 
Pyrenees ? Out of that one crack, which men call the 
Val d'Ossan, stone has been swept enough to form a 
considerable island. Where is it all? In these 
Landes. Carried down year by year to the Atlantic, 
it has been driven back again, year by year, by the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



fierce gales of the Bay of Biscay, and rolled up into 
banks and dunes of loose sand, till it has rilled up what 
was once a broad estuary, 140 miles across and perhaps 
70 miles in depth. Upheaved it may have been also, 
slowly, from the sea, for recent sea-shells are found as 
far inland as Dax; and thus the whole upper end of 
the Bay of Biscay has transformed itself during the 
lapse of, it may be, countless ages, into a desolate wil- 
derness. 

It is at Dax that we leave the main line, and instead 
of running north for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, 
turn south-east to Orthez and Pau, and the Gaves, and 
the Pyrenees. 

And now we pass through ragged uplands, woody 
and moorish, with the long yellow maize-stalks of 
last year's crop rotting in the swampy glens. For 
the 'petite culture,' whatever be its advantages, gives 
no capital or power of combined action for draining wet 
lands ; and the valleys of Gascony and Beam in the 
south, as well as great' sheets of the Pas de Calais in 
the north, are in a waterlogged state, equally shocking 
to the eye of a British farmer, and injurious to the 
health and to the crops of the peasants. 
* Soon we strike the Aclour, here of the shape and 
size of a second-class Scotch salmon-stream, with 
swirling brown pools beneath grey crags, which make 
one long to try in them the virtues of 'Jock Scott,' 

K 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



' the Butcher/ or the ' Dusty Miller.' And perhaps not 
without effect ; for salmon are there still ; and will be 
more and more as French ( pisciculture ' develops itself 
under Government supervision. 

Here we touch again the line of that masterly 
retreat of Soult's before the superior forces of Welling- 
ton, to which Napier has done such ample and deserved 
justice. 

There is Berenz, where the Sixth and Light divisions 
crossed the Gave, and clambered into the high road up 
steep ravines ; and there is Orthez itself, with the beau- 
tiful old Gothic bridge which the French could not 
blow up, as they did every other bridge on their retreat; 
and the ruins of that robber den to which Gaston 
Phoebus, Count of Foix (of whom you may read in 
Froissart), used to drag his victims ; and there over- 
head, upon the left of the rail and road, is the old 
Roman camp, and the hill of Orthez, and St. Boes, and 
the High Church of Baights, the scene of the terrible 
battle of Orthez. 

The Eoman camp, then ' open and grassy, with a few 
trees,' says Napier, is now covered with vineyards. 
Everywhere the fatal slopes are rich with cultivation, 
plenty, and peace. God grant they may remain so for 
ever. 

And so, along the Gave de Pau, we run on to Pau, 
the ancient capital of Beam; the birthplace of Henri 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



Quatre, and of Bernadotte, King of Sweden ; where, in 
the charming old chateau, restored by Louis Philippe, 
those who list may see the tortoise which served as the 
great Henry's cradle ; and believe, if they list also, the 
tale that that is the real shell. 

For in 1793, when the knights of the 'bonnet rouge' 
and ' carmagnole complete ' burst into the castle, to 
destroy every memorial of hated royalty, the shell 
among the rest, there chanced— miraculous coincidence 
— to be in Pau, in the collection of a naturalist, another 
shell, of the same shape and size. Swiftly and deftly 
pious hands substituted it for the real relic, leaving it 
to be battered in pieces and trampled in the mud, while 
the royal cradle lay perdu for years in the roof of a 
house, to reappear duly at the Piestoration 6f the 
Bourbons. 

Of Pau I shall say nothing. It would be real im- 
pertinence in one who only spent three days in it, to 
describe a city which is known to all Europe ; which is 
a permanent English colony, and boasts of one, and 
sometimes two, packs of English fox-hounds. But this 
I may be allowed to say. That of all delectable spots I 
have yet seen, Pau is the most delectable. Of all the 
landscapes which I have beheld, that from the Place 
Iioyale is, for variety, richness, and grandeur, the most 
glorious ; at least as I saw it for the first time. 

Beneath the wall of the high terrace are rich 

02 



196 PROSE IDYLLS. 



meadows, vocal with frogs rejoicing in the rain, and 
expressing their joy, not in the sober monotone of our 
English frogs, but each according to his kind ; one 
bellowing, the next barking, the next cawing, and the 
next (probably the little green Hylas, who has come 
down out of the trees to breed) quacking in treble like 
a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect) is that of the 
gorgeous edible frog ; and so suspect the young recruits 
who lounge upon the wall, and look down wistfully, 
longing, I presume, to eat him. And quite right they 
are ; for he (at least his thigh) is exceeding good to eat, 
tenderer and sweeter than any spring chicken. 

Beyond the meadow, among the poplars, the broad 
Gave murmurs on over, shingly shallows, between 
aspen-fringed islets, grey with the melting snows ; 
and beyond her again rise broken wooded hills, dotted 
with handsome houses ; and beyond them a veil of 
mist and rain. 

On a sudden that veil lifts ; and five-and-twenty 
miles away, beneath the black edge of the cloud, 
against the clear blue sky, stands out the whole snow- 
range of the Pyrenees ; and in the midst, exactly 
opposite, filling up a vast gap which is the Val d'Ossan, 
the huge cone, still snowy white, of the Pic du Midi. 

He who is conversant with theatres will be unable to 
overlook the seeming art — and even artifice — of such 
an effect. The clouds lift like a drop-scene ; the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



mountains are so utterly unlike any natural object in 
the north, that for the moment one fancies them painted 
and not real; the Pic du Midi stands so exactly where' 
it ought, and is yet so fantastic and unexpected in its 
shape, that an artist seems to have put it there. 

But he who knows nothing, and cares less, about 
theatres and their sham glories, and sees for the first 
time in his life the eternal snows of which he has read 
since childhood, draws his breath deeply, and stands 
astounded, whispering to himself that God is great. 

One hint more, ere we pass on from Pau. Here, at 
least in spring time, of all places in Europe, may a 
man feed his ears with song of birds. The copses by 
the Gave, the public walks and woods (wherein English 
prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere 
shot down as game, even to the poor little cock-robins 
whose corpses lie by dozens in too many French 
markets), are filled with all our English birds of 
passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco 
and Algiers ; and with our English nightingales, black- 
caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other song- 
sters which never find their way to these isles, for 
which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. 
Bree — and chief among them the dark Orpheus, and 
the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the blackcap, and 
almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and 
variety of song — the polyglot warbler which penetrates, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



in summer, as far north as the shores of the British 
Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty 
miles of sea, after a land journey — and by night, too, as 
all the warblers journey — from Africa. 

At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and 
who would go eastward had to take carriage, and go by 
the excellent road (all public roads in the south of 
France are excellent, and equal to our best English 
roads) over the high Landes to Tarbes ; and on again 
over fresh Landes to Montrejean ; and thence by rail- 
way to Toulouse. 

They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from 
which innumerable streams pour down to swell the 
Adour and the Garonne ; and as one rolls along, listen- 
ing to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, only two 
roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, 
the cultivation, spreading rapidly since the Eevolution, 
over what was open moor ; and next the great natural 
parks which one traverses here and there ; the remnants 
of those forests which were once sacred to the seigneurs 
and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and 
the game with them ; and the forests are almost gone — 
so ruinate, indeed, by the peasantry, that the Govern- 
ment (I believe) has interfered to stop a destruction of 
timber, which involves the destruction both of fire-wood 
and of the annual fall of rain. But the trees which 
remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 199 

"mangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, 
and firing scarce ; and the country method of obtaining 
it is to send a woman up a tree, where she hacks off, 
with feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs half-way out 
from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroying by 
letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, 
and walnuts. Painful and hideous, to an eye accus- 
tomed to British parks, are the forms of these once 
noble trees. 

Suddenly we descend a brow into the Yale of Tarbes : 
a good land and large ; a labyrinth of clear streams, 
water-meadows, cherry-orchards, and crops of every 
kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, with its 
once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the 
pages of Froissart — or, if you prefer a later authority, 
in those of Dumas, ' Trois Mousquetaires ;' for this is 
the native land of the immortal Ulysses of Gascony, 
the Chevalier d'Artagnan. 

There you may see, to your surprise, not only gentle- 
men, but ladies, taking their pleasure on horseback 
after the English fashion ; for there is close by a great 
'haras,' or Government establishment for horse-breed- 
ing. You may watch the quaint dresses in the market- 
place ; you may rest, as Froissart rested of old, in a 
' right pleasant inn ;' you may eat of the delicious cookery 
which is to be found, even in remote towns, through- 
out the south of France, and even — if you dare — of 



PROSE IDYLLS. . 



' Coquilles aux Champignons.' You may sit out after 
dinner in that delicious climate, listening to the rush 
of the clear Adour through streets, and yards, and 
culverts ; for the city, like Eomsey, or Salisbury, is , 
built over many streams. You may watch the Pyrenees 
changing from white to rose, from rose to lead colour, 
and then dying away into the night — for twilight there 
is little or none, here in the far south. 

' The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, 
At one stride comes the dark.' 

And soon from street to street you hear the ' clarion ' 
of the garrison, that singularly wild and sweet trumpet- 
call which sends French soldiers to their beds. And 
at that the whole populace swarms out, rich and poor, 
and listens entranced beneath the trees in the Place 
Maubourguet, as if they had never heard it before ; 
with an order and a sobriety, and a good humour, and 
a bowing to each other, and asking and giving of cigar- 
lights between men of every class — and a little quiet 
modest love-making on the outskirts of the crowd, which 
is very pleasant to behold. And when the music is 
silent, and the people go off suddenly, silently, and 
soberly withal (for there are no drunkards in these 
parts), to their early beds, you stand and look up 
into the 'purple night,' as Homer calls it — that 
southern sky, intensely dark, and yet transparent 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



withal, through which you seem to look beyond the 
stars into the infinite itself, and recollect that beyond 
all that, and through all that likewise, there is an 
infinite good God who cares for all these simple kindly 
folk ; and that by Him all their hearts are as well 
known, and all their infirmities as mercifully weighed, 
as are, you trust, your own. 

And so you go to rest, content to say, with the wise 
American, ' It takes all sorts to make a world.' 

The next morn you rise, to roll on over yet more 
weary uplands to Montrejean, over long miles of 
sandy heath, a magnified Aldershott, which during 
certain summer months is gay, here and there, like 
Aldershott, with the tents of an army at play. But 
in spring the desolation is utter, and the loneliest 
grouse-moor, and the boggiest burn, are more cheerful 
and varied than the Landes of Lannemezan, and the 
foul streamlets which have sawn gorges through the 
sandy waste. 

But all the while, on your right hand, league after 
league, ever fading into blue sky behind you, and 
growing afresh out of blue aky in front, hangs high in 
air the white saw of the Pyrenees. High, I say, in 
air, for the land slopes, or seems to slope, clown from 
you to the mountain range, and all their roots are lost 
in a dim sea of purple haze. But shut out the snow 
line above, and you will find that the seeming haze 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



is none, but really a clear and richly varied distance 
of hills, and woods, and towns, which have become 
invisible from the contrast of their greens, and greys, 
and purples, with the glare and dazzle of the spotless 
snows of spring. 

There they stand, one straight continuous jagged 
wall, of which no one point seems higher than another. 
From the Pic d'Ossan, by the Mont Perdu and the 
Maladetta to the Pic de Lart, are peaks past counting — 
hard clear white against the hard clear blue, and 
blazing with keen light beneath the high southern 
sun. Each peak carries its little pet cushion of cloud, 
hanging motionless a few hundred yards above in the 
blue sky, a row of them as far as eye can see. But, 
ever and anon, as afternoon draws on, one of those 
little clouds, seeming tired of waiting at its post ever 
since sunrise, loses its temper, boils, swells, settles 
down on its own private peak, and explodes in a fierce 
thunderstorm down its own private valley, without 
discomposing in the least its neighbour cloud-cushions 
right and left. Faintly the roll of the thunder reaches 
the ear. Across some great blackness of cloud and 
cliff, a tiny spark darts down. A long wisp of mist 
sweeps rapidly toward you across the lowlands, and a 
momentary brush of cold rain lays the dust And 
then the pageant is played out, and the disturbed peak 
is left clear again in the blue sky for the rest of the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



day, to gather another cloud-cushion when to-morrow's 
sun shall rise. 

To him who looks, day after day, on this astonish- 
ing natural wall, stretching, without visible gap, for 
nearly three hundred miles, it is easy to see why 
France not only is, but must be, a different world 
from Spain. Even human thought cannot, to any 
useful extent, fly over that great wall of homeless 
rock and snow. On the other side there must needs 
be another folk, with another tongue, other manners, 
other politics, and if not another creed, yet surely with 
other, and utterly different, conceptions of the universe, 
and of man's business therein. Eailroads may do 
somewhat. But what of one railroad ; or even of two, 
one on the ocean, one on the sea, two hundred and 
seventy miles apart ? Before French civilization can 
inform and elevate the Spanish people you must 
' plane down the Pyrenees.' 

At Montrejean, a pretty town upon a hill which 
overhangs the Garonne, you find, again, verdure and 
a railroad ; and, turning your back upon the Pyrenees, 
run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, through 
crops of exceeding richness — wheat, which is reaped in 
July, to be followed by buckwheat reaped in October ; 
then by green crops to be cut in May, and that again 
by maize, to be pulled in October, and followed by 
wheat and the same rotation. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



last, bright between the dark stems. Up a steep slope, 
and over a bank which is not very big, but being com- 
posed of loose gravel and peat mould, gives down with 
me, nearly sending me head over heels in the heather, 
and leaving me a sheer gap to scramble through, and 
out on the open moor. 

Grand old moor ! stretching your brown flats right 
away toward "Windsor for many a mile. — Far to our 
right is the new Wellington College, looking stately 
enough here all alone in the wilderness, in spite of its 
two ugly towers and pinched waist. Close over me 
is the long fir-fringed ride of Easthampstead, ending 
suddenly in Caesar's camp ; and hounds and huntsmen 
are already far ahead, and racing up the Eoman road, 
which the clods of these parts, unable to give a better 
account of it, call the Devil's Highway. 

Kacing indeed ; for as Eeinecke gallops up the nar- 
row heather-fringed pathway, he brushes off his scent 
upon the twigs at every stride ; and the hounds race 
after him, showing no head indeed, and keeping, for 
convenience, in one long line upon the track : but going 
heads up, sterns down, at a pace which no horse can 
follow. — I only hope they may not overrun the scent. 

They have overran it ; halt, and put their heads down 
a moment. But with one swift cast in full gallop they 
have hit it off again, fifty yards away in the heather, 
long ere the horsemen are up to them ; for those hounds 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



can hunt a fox because they are not hunted themselves, 
and so have learnt to trust themselves, and act for 
themselves ; as hoys should learn at school, even at the 
risk of a mistake or two. Now they are showing head 
indeed, down a half-cleared valley, and over a few 
ineffectual turnips withering in the peat, a patch of 
growing civilization in the heart of the wilderness ; and 
then over the brook, while I turn slowly away, through 
a green wilderness of self-sown firs. 

There they stand in thousands, the sturdy Scots, 
colonizing the desert in spite of frost, and gales, and 
barrenness ; and clustering together, too, as Scotsmen 
always do abroad, little and big, every one under his 
neighbour's lee, according to the good old proverb of 
their native land, ' Caw me, and I'll caw thee.' 

I respect them, those Scotch firs. I' delight in their 
forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in 
Bramshill Park — the only place in England where a 
painter can learn what Scotch firs are — down to the 
little green pyramids which stand up out of the 
heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange 
woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an 
average have most of them spent in ineffectual efforts 
to become a foot high. Nibbled off by hares, trodden 
down by cattle, cut down by turf-parers, seeing 
hundreds of their brethren cut up and carried off 
in the turf : fuel, they are as gnarled and stubbed near 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the ground as an old thorn-bush in a pasture. But 
they have conquered at last, and are growing away, 
eighteen inches a year, with fair green brushes silver- 
tipt, reclothing the wilderness with a vegetation which 
it has not seen for — how many thousand years ? 

No man can tell. For when last the Scotch fir was 
indigenous to England, and, mixed with the larch, 
stretched in one vast forest from Norfolk into Wales, 
England was not as it is now. Snowdon was, it may 
be, fifteen thousand feet in height, and from the edges 
of its glaciers the marmot and the musk ox, the elk 
and the bear, wandered down into the Lowlands, and 
the hyena and the lion dwelt in those caves where fox 
and badger only now abide. And how did the Scotch 
fir die out ? Did the whole land sink slowly from its 
sub-Alpine elevation into a warmer climate below ? Or 
was it never raised at all ? Did some change of the 
Atlantic sea-floor turn for the first time the warm Gulf 
Stream to these shores ; and with its soft sea-breezes 
melt away the ' Age of Ice,' till glaciers and pines, 
marmots and musk oxen, perspired to death, and 
vanished for an eeon ? Who knows ? Not I. But 
of the fact there can be no doubt. Whether, as we 
hold traditionally here, the Scotch fir was re-introduced 
by James the First when he built Bramshill for 
Raleigh's hapless pet, Henry the Prince, or whatever 
may have been the date of their re-introduction, here 



MY J VINTER-G A RD Erf. 



they are, and no one can turn them out. In countless 
thousands the winged seeds float down the south-west 
gales from the older trees ; and every seed which falls 
takes root in ground which, however unable to bear 
broad-leaved trees, is ready by long rest for the seeds of 
the needle-leaved ones. Thousands perish yearly ; but 
the eastward march of the whole, up hill and down 
dale, is sure and steady as that of Lynceus' Goths in 
Goethe's Helena : — 

' Ein lang und breites Volksgewicht, 
Der erste wusste vom letzen nicht. 

Der CTste fie], der zweite stand, 
Des dritten Lanze war zur Hand, 
Ein jeder hundertfack gestarkt ; 
Erschlagene Tausend unbemerkt 

— till, as you stand upon some eminence, you see, 
stretching to the eastward of each tract of older trees, 
a long cloud of younger ones, like a green comet's tail 
— I wish their substance was as yielding this day. 
Truly beautiful — grand indeed to me it is — to see 
young live Nature thus carrying on a great savage pro- 
cess in the heart of this old and seemingly all-artificial 
English land ; and reproducing here, as surely as in the 
Australian bush, a native forest, careless of mankind. 
Still, I wish it were easier to ride through. Stiff are 
those Scotchmen, and close and stout they stand by 
each other, and claw at you as you twist through them, 



168 PEOSE IDYLLS. 



the biggest aiming at your head, or even worse, at your 
knees ; while the middle-sized slip their brushes between 
your thigh and the saddle, and the little babies tickle 
your horse's stomach, or twine about his fore-feet. 
Whish — whish ; we are enveloped in what seems an 
atmosphere of scrubbing-brushes. Fain would I shut 
my eyes : but dare not, or I shall ride against a tree. 
Whish — whish ; alas for the horse which cannot wind 
and turn like a hare ! Plunge — stagger. What is 
this ? A broad line of ruts ; perhaps some Celtic track- 
way, two thousand years old, now matted over with firs ; 
dangerous enough out on the open moor, when only 
masked by a line of higher and darker heath: but 
doubly dangerous now when masked by dark under- 
growth. You must find your own way here, mare. I 
will positively have nothing to do with it. I disclaim 
all responsibility. There are the reins on your neck ; 
do what you will, only do something — and if jou. can, 
get forward, and not back. 

There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot con- 
temptuously through the advanced skirmishers of the 
Scotch invading army; and watch my friends some 
mile and a half off, who have threaded a practicable 
trackway through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet 
for firs to root in, and are away in ' a streamer.' Now 
a streamer is produced in this wise. There is but one 
possible gap in a bank, one possible ford in a brook ; 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



one possible path in a cover ; and as each man has to 
wait till the man before him gets through, and then 
gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on 
the man before him : wherefore, by all laws of known 
arithmetic, if ten men tail through a gap, then will the 
last of the ten find himself two hundred yards behind 
the foremost, which process several times repeated, pro- 
duces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. twenty 
men galloping absurdly as hard as they can, in a line 
half a mile long, and in humours which are celestial 
in the few foremost, contented in the central, and 
gradually becoming darker in the hindmost ; till in 
the last man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean. 
Farewell, brave gentlemen ! I watch, half sadly, half 
self-contented, the red coats scattered like sparks of 
fire over hill and dale, and turn slowly homeward, to 
visit my old women. 

I pass through a gateway, out upon a village green, 
planted with rows of oaks, surrounded by trim sunny 
cottages, a pleasant oasis in the middle of the wilder- 
ness. Across the village cricket-ground — we are great 
cricketers in these parts, and long may the good old 
game live among us ; and then up another hollow lane, 
which leads between damp shaughs and copses toward 
the further moor. 

Curious things to a minute philosopher are these 
same hollow lanes. They set him on archaeological 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



questions, more than he can solve ; and I meditate as I 
go, how many centuries it took to saw through the warm 
sandbanks this dyke ten feet deep, up which he trots, 
with the oak boughs meeting over his head. Was it 
ever worth men's while to dig out the soil? Surely 
not. The old method must have been, to remove the 
softer upper spit, till they got to tolerably hard ground ; 
and then, Macadam's metal being as yet unknown, the 
rains and the wheels of generations sawed it gradually 
deeper and deeper, till this road-ditch was formed. But 
it must have taken centuries to do it. Many of these 
hollow lanes, especially those on flat ground, must be 
as old or older than the Conquest. In Devonshire I am 
sure that they are. But there many of them, one sus- 
pects, were made not of malice, but of cowardice pre- 
pense. Your indigenous Celt was, one fears, a sneaking 
animal, and liked to keep when he could under cover of 
banks and hill-sides ; while your bold Boman made his 
raised roads straight over hill and dale, as ' ridge- ways ' 
from which, as from an eagle's eyrie, he could survey 
the conquered lowlands far and wide. It marks strongly 
the difference between the two races, that difference 
between the Boman paved road with its established 
common way for all passengers, its regular stations and 
milestones, and the Celtic trackway winding irresolutely 
along in innumerable ruts, parting to meet again, as if 
each savage (for they were little better) had taken his 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 171 

own fresh path when he found the next line of ruts too 
heavy for his cattle. Around the spurs of Dartmoor 
I have seen many ancient roads, some of them long- 
disused, which could have been hollowed out for no 
other purpose but that of concealment. 

So I go slowly up the hill, till the valley lies beneath 
me like a long green garden between its two banks of 
brown moor ; and on through a cheerful little green, 
with red brick cottages scattered all round, each with 
its large neat garden, and beehives, and pigs and geese, 
and turf-stack, and clipt yews and hollies before the 
door, and rosy dark-eyed children, and all the simple 
healthy comforts of a wild 'heth-cropper's' home. When 
he can, the good man of the house works at farm 
labour, or cuts his own turf; and when work is scarce, 
he cuts copses and makes heath-brooms, and does a 
little poaching. True, he seldom, goes to church, save 
to be christened, married, or buried : but he equally 
seldom gets drunk. Tor church and public stand to- 
gether two miles off; so that social wants sometimes 
bring their own compensations with them, and there 
are two sides to every question. 

Hark ! A faint, dreary hollo off the moor above. 
And then another, and another. My friends may 
trust it; for the clod of these parts delights in the 
chase like any bare-legged Paddy, and casts away 
flail and fork wildly, to run, shout, assist, and in- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



terfere in all possible ways, out of pure love. The 
descendant of many generations of broom-squires and 
deer-stealers, the instinct of sport is strong within him 
still, though no more of the king's deer are to be 
shot in the winter turnip-fields, or worse, caught by an 
apple-baited hook hung from an orchard bough. He 
now limits his aspirations to hares and pheasants, and 
too probably once in his life, ' hits the keeper into the 
river/ and reconsiders himself for a while after over a 
crank in Winchester gaol. Well, he has his faults ; 
and I have mine. But he is a thorough good fellow 
nevertheless ; quite as good as I : civil, contented, in- 
dustrious, and often very handsome ; and a far shrewder 
fellow too— owing to his dash of wild forest blood, 
from gipsy, highwayman, and what not — than his bullet- 
headed and flaxen-polled cousin, the pure South-Saxon 
of the Chalk-downs. Dark-haired he is, ruddy, and 
tall of bone; swaggering in his youth; but when he 
grows old, a thorough gentleman, reserved, stately, and 
courteous as a prince. Sixteen years have I lived with 
him hail fellow well met, and never yet had a rude 
word or action from him. 

With him I have cast in my lot, to live and die, and 
be buried by his side; and to him I go home con- 
tented, to look after his petty interests, cares, sorrows — 
Petty, truly — seeing that they include the whole primal 
mysteries of life — Food, raiment, and work to earn them 



MY WINTER-GARDEN. 



withal ; love and marriage, birth and death, right 
doing and wrong doing, ' Schicksal und eigene Schuld ; ' 
and all those commonplaces of humanity which in the 
eyes of a minute philosopher are most divine, because 
they are most commonplace — catholic as the sunshine 
and the rain which come down from the Heavenly 
Father, alike upon the evil and the good. As for 
doing fine things, my friend, with you, I have learnt 
to believe that I am not set to do fine things, simply 
because I am not able to do them ; and as for seeing 
fine things, with you, I have learnt to see the sight — 
as well as to try to do the duty — which lies nearest me ; 
and to comfort myself with the fancy that if I make 
good use of my eyes and brain in this life, I shall see — 
if it be of any use to me — all the fine things, or per- 
haps finer still, in the life to come. But if not — what 
matter ? In any life, in any state, however simple or 
humble, there will be always sufficient to occupy a 
Minute Philosopher ; and if a man be busy, and busy 
about his duty, what more does he require, for time 
or for eternity? 



V. 
FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



Y. 

FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 

The point from which to start, in order best to appre- 
ciate the change from ocean to sea, is perhaps Biarritz. 
The point at which to stop is Cette. And the change 
is important. Between the two points races are 
changed, climates are changed, scenery is changed, the 
very plants under your feet are changed, from a 
Western to an Eastern type. You pass from the 
wild Atlantic into the heart of the Eoman Empire — 
from the influences which formed the discoverers of the 
New World, to those which formed the civilizers of the 
Old. Gascony, not only in its scenery, hut in its very 
legends, reminds you of Devon and Cornwall; Lan- 
guedoc of Greece and Palestine. 

In the sea, as was to he expected, the change is even 
more complete. From Biarritz to Cette, you pass from 
poor Edward Forbes's Atlantic to his Mediterranean 
centre of creation. In plain English and fact, whether 

K s 



PILOSE IDYLLS. 



you agree with his theory or not, you pass from the 
region of respectable whales, herrings, and salmon, to 
that of tunnies, scisenas, dorados, and all the gorgons, 
hydras, and chimseras dire, which are said to grace the 
fish-markets of Barcelona or Marseilles. 

But to this assertion, as to most concerning nature, 
there are exceptions. Mediterranean fishes slip out of 
the Straits of Gibraltar, and up the coast of Portugal, 
and, once in the Bay of Biscay, find the feeding good 
and the wind against them, and stay there. 

So it befalls, that at worthy M. Gardere's hotel at 
Biarritz (he has seen service in England, and knows 
our English ways), you may have at dinner, day after 
day, salmon, louvine, shad, sardine, dorado, tunny. 
The first is unknown to the Mediterranean ; for Fluellen 
mistook when he said that there were salmons in 
Macedon, as well as Monmouth ; the louvine is none 
other than the nasty bass, or sea-perch of the Atlantic ; 
the shad (extinct in these islands, save in the Severn) 
is a gigantic herring which comes up rivers to spawn ; 
a fish common (with slight differences) to both sides of 
the North Atlantic ; while the sardine, the dorado, and 
the tunny (whether he be the true tunny or the Ala- 
longa) are Mediterranean fish. 

The whale fishery of these shores is long extinct. 
The Biscay an whale was supposed to be extinct like- 
wise. But like the ibex, and some other animals 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 179 

which man has ceased to hunt, because he fancies that 
he has killed them all, they seem inclined to reappear. 
For in 1854 one was washed ashore near St. Jean de 
Luz, at news whereof Eschricht, the great Danish natu- 
ralist, travelled night and day from Copenhagen, and 
secured the skeleton of the new-old monster. 

But during the latter part of the Middle Ages, and 
on — if I recollect aright — into the seventeenth century, 
Bayonne, Biarritz, Guettary, and St. Jean de Luz, sent 
forth their hardy whale-fishers, who slew all the whales 
of the Biscayan seas, and then crossed the Atlantic, to 
attack those of the frozen North. 

British and American enterprise drove them from the 
"West coast of the Atlantic ; and now their descendants 
are content to stay at home and take the sardine-shoals, 
and send them in to Bayonne on their daughters' heads. 

Pretty enough it was, at least in outward seeming, to 
meet a party of those fisher-girls, bare-legged, high- 
kilted, lithe as deer, trotting, at a long loping pace, up 
the high road toward Bayonne, each with her basket on 
her head, as she laughed and sang, and tossed her black 
hair, and flashed her brown eyes, full of life and the 
enjoyment of life. Pretty enough. And yet who will 
blame the rail, which now sends her quickly into 
Bayonne — or even her fish without her; and relieves 
the fair young maiden from being degraded into a 
beast of burden ? 

a 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Handsome folk are these brown Basques. A myste- 
rious people, who dwell alone, and are not counted among 
the nations ; speaking an unique language, and keeping 
up unique customs, for which the curious must consult 
M. Michel's interesting book. There may be a cross of 
English blood among them, too, about Biarritz and 
Bayonne ; English features there are, plainly to be 
seen. And whether or not, one accepts the story of the 
country, that Anglets, near by, is an old English colony 
left by our Black Prince, it is certain that Bayonne 
Cathedral was built in part by English architects, and 
carries the royal arms of England ; and every school 
history will tell us how this corner of Erance was long 
in our hands, and was indeed English long before it 
was properly Erench. Moorish blood there may be, 
too, here and there, left behind by those who built the 
little ' atalaya ' or fire-beacon, over the old harbour, to 
correspond, by its smoke column, with a long line of 
similar beacons down the Spanish coast. The Basques 
resemble in look the Southern Welsh — quick-eyed, 
neat in feature, neat in dress, often, both men and 
women, beautiful. The men wear a fiat Scotch cap of 
some bright colour, and call it ' berretta.' The women 
tie a gaudy handkerchief round their heads, and compel 
one corner to stand forward from behind the ear in a 
triangle, in proportion to the size and stiffness whereof 
the lady seems to think herself well dressed. But 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 181 

the pretty Basque handkerchief will soon give place 
to the Parisian bonnet. For every cove among the 
rocks is now filled with smart bathing-houses, from 
which, in summer, the gay folk of Paris issue in 
'costume de bain,' to float about all day on cala- 
bashes — having literally no room for the soles of their 
feet on land. Then are opened casinos, theatre, 
shops, which lie closed all the winter. Then do the 
Basque house-owners flee into the moors, and camp 
out (it is said) on the hills all night, letting their 
rooms for ten francs a night as mere bed-chambers — 
for all eating and living is performed in public ; 
while the dove-coloured oxen, with brown holland 
pinafores over their backs, who dawdle in pairs up 
and down the long street with their light carts, have 
to make way for wondrous equipages from the Bois 
de Boulogne. 

Not then, for the wise man, is Biarritz a place to 
see and to love: but in the winter, when a little 
knot of quiet pleasant English hold the place against 
all comers, and wander, undisturbed by fashion, about 
the quaint little rocks and caves and natural bridges — 
and watch tumbling into the sea, before the Biscayan 
surges, the trim walks and summer-houses, which 
were erected by the municipality in honour of the 
Empress and her suite. Yearly they tumble in, and 
yearly are renewed, as the soft greensand strata are 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



graven away, and what must have been once a long 
promontory becomes a group of fantastic pierced rocks, 
exactly like those which are immortalized upon the 
willow-pattern plates. 

Owing to this rapid destruction, the rocks of Biarritz 
are very barren in sea-beasts and sea-weeds. But there 
is one remarkable exception, where the pools worn in a 
hard limestone are filled with what seem at first sight 
beds of china- asters, of all loveliest colours — primrose, 
sea-green, dove, purple, crimson, pink, ash-grey. They 
are all prickly sea-eggs (presumably the Echinus livi- 
dus, which is found in similar places in the west of 
Ireland), each buried for life in a cup-shaped hole 
which he has excavated in the rock, and shut in by an 
overhanging lip of living lime — seemingly a Nullipore 
coralline. What they do there, what they think of, or 
what food is brought into their curious grinding-mills 
by the Atlantic surges which thunder over them twice 
a day, who can tell ? However they form, without 
doubt, the most beautiful object which I have ever 
seen in pool or cove. 

But the glory of Biarritz, after all, is the moors 
above, and the view to be seen therefrom. Under 
blazing blue skies, tempered by soft dappled cloud, 
for ever sliding from the Atlantic and the Asturias 
mountains, in a climate soft as milk, and exhilarating 
withal as wine, one sees far and wide a panorama 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 183 

which, from its variety as well as its beauty, can 
never weary. 

To the north, the long sand-line of the Biscayan 
shore-r-the bar of the Adour marked by a cloud of 
grey spray. Then the dark pine-flats of the Landes, 
and the towers of Bayonne rising through rich woods. 
To the eastward lies a high country, furred with woods, 
broken with glens; a country exactly like Devon, 
through the heart of which, hidden in such a gorge 
as that of Dart or Taw, runs the swift stream of the 
Nive, draining the western Pyrenees, And beyond, 
to the south-east, in early spring, the Pyrenean snows 
gleam bright, white clouds above the clouds. As one 
turns southward, the mountains break down into brown 
heather-hills, like Scottish grouse moors. The two 
nearest, and seemingly highest, are the famous Khune 
and Bayonette, where lie, to this day, amid the heath 
and crags, hundreds of unburied bones. Tor those 
great hills, skilfully fortified by Soult before the 
passage of the Bidassoa, were stormed, yard by yard, 
by Wellington's army in October 1813. That mighty 
deed must be read in the pages of one who saw it 
with his own eyes, and fought there with his own noble 
body, and even nobler spirit. It is not for me to tell 
of victories, of which Sir William Napier has already 
told. 

Towards that hill, and the Nivelle at its foot, the 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



land slopes down, still woode'd and broken, bounded 
by a long sweep of clayey crumbling cliff. The eye 
catches the fort of Secoa, at the mouth of the Mvelle — 
once Wellington's sea-base for his great Frencji cam- 
paign. Then Fontarabia, at the Bidassoa mouth; and 
far off, the cove within which lies the fatal citadel 
of St. Sebastian ; all backed up by the fantastic 
mountains of Spain; the four-horned "Quatre Cou- 
ronnes," the pyramidal Jaysquivel, and beyond them 
again, sloping headlong into the sea, peak after peak, 
each one more blue and tender than the one before, 
leading the eye on and on for seemingly countless 
leagues, till they die away into the ocean horizon and 
the boundless west. Not a sail, often for days together, 
passes between those mountains and the shore on 
which we stand, to break the solitude, and peace, 
and vast expanse ; and we linger, looking and looking 
at we know not what, and find repose in gazing 
purposeless into the utter void. 

Very unlike France are these Basque uplands ; very 
like the seaward parts of Devon and Cornwall. Large 
oak-copses and boggy meadows fill the glens ; while 
above, the small fields, with their five-barred gates 
(relics of the English occupation) and high furze and 
heath-grown banks, make you fancy yourself for a 
moment in England. And the illusion is strengthened, 
as you see that the heath of the banks is the Goonhilly 



FBOM OCEAN TO SEA. 185 

heath of the Lizard Point, and that of the "bogs the 
orange-belled Erica ciliaris, which lingers (though rare) 
both in Cornwall and in the south of Ireland. But 
another glance undeceives you. The wild flowers are 
new, saving those cosmopolitan seeds (like nettles and 
poppies) which the Romans have carried all over 
Europe, and the British are now carrying over the 
world. Every sandy bank near the sea is covered with 
the creeping stems of a huge reed, which grows in 
summer tall enough to make not only high fences, 
but fishing-rods. Poverty (though there is none of 
what we call poverty in Britain) fills the little walled 
court before its cottage with bay trees and standard 
figs ; while wealth (though there is nothing here of 
what we call wealth in Britain) asserts itself uniformly 
by great standard magnolias, and rich trailing roses, 
in full bloom here in April instead of — as with us — 
in July. Both on bank and in bog grow Scorzoneras 
(dandelions with sword-shaped leaves) of which there 
are none in these isles; and every common is ablaze 
with strange and lovely flowers. Each dry spot is 
brilliant with the azure flowers of a prostrate Litho- 
spermum, so exquisite a plant, that it is a marvel why 
we do not see it, as ' spring-bedding,' in every British 
garden. The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the 
large white flowers and trailing stems of the sage- 
leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. 
And here and there among furze and heath, crop out 
great pink bunches of the Daphne Cneorum of our 
gardens, perfuming all the air. Yes, we are indeed 
in foreign parts, in the very home of that Atlantic 
flora, of which only a few species have reached the 
south-west of these isles; and on the limit of another 
flora also — of that of Italy and Greece. "For as we 
descend into the glen, every lane-hank and low 
tree is entwined, not with ivy, but with a still 
more beautiful evergreen, the Smilax of South-eastern 
Europe, with its zigzag stems, and curving heart- 
shaped leaves, and hooked thorns ; the very oak-scrub 
is of species unknown to Britain. And what are 
these tall lilies, which fill every glade breast-high with 
their sword-like leaves, and spires of white flowers, 
lilac-pencilled ? They are the classic flower, the 
Asphodel of Greece and Grecian song; the Asphodel 
through which the ghosts of Homer's heroes strode: 
as heroes' ghosts might stride even here. 

For here we are on sacred ground. The vegetation 
is rank with the blood of gallant invaders, and of no 
less gallant patriots. In the words of Campbell's 
• Hohenlinden ' — 

' Every turf beneath our feet 
May be a hero's sepulchre.' 

That little tarn below has 'bubbled with crimson 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 187 

foam ' when the kings of Europe arose to bring home 
the Bourbons, as did the Lake Eegillus of old, in the 
day when 'the Thirty Cities swore to bring the 
Tarquins home.' 

Turn to the left, above the tarn, and into the great 
Spanish road from Bayonne to the frontier at what 
was lately 'La Negresse,' but is now a gay railway 
station. "Where that station is, was another tarn, 
now drained. The road ran between the two. And 
that narrow space of two hundred yards, on which 
we stand, was for three fearful days the gate of 
France. 

For on the 10th of December, 1813, Soult, driven 
into Bayonne by Wellington's advance, rushed out 
again in the early morn, and poured a torrent of 
living men down this road, and upwards again towards 
the British army which crested that long ridge in 
front. 

The ridge slopes rapidly away at the back, toward 
the lowlands of the Bidassoa; and once thrust from 
it, the English army would have been cut in two — 
one half driven back upon their sea-base at St. Jean 
de Luz : the other half left on the further side of 
the Adqur. 

And this was the gate, which had to be defended 
during a three days' battle. That long copse which 
overhangs the road is the famous wood, which was 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



taken and retaken many times. Yon house above 
it, embowered in trees, is the 'Mayor's house,' in 
which Sir John Hope was so nearly captured by the 
French. Somewhere behind the lane where we came 
down was the battery which blasted off our troops 
as they ran up from the lowlands behind, to support 
their fellows. 

Of the details of the fight you must read in Napier's 
'Peninsular War/ and in Mr. Gleig's 'Subaltern.' 
They are not to be described by one who never saw 
a battle, great or small. 

And now, if you choose to start upon your journey 
from the ocean to the sea, you will take the railroad 
here, and run five miles through the battle-fields into 
Bayonne, the quaint old fortress city, girdled with a 
labyrinth of walls, and turf-dykes, and outside them 
meadows as rich, and trees as stately, as if war had 
never swept across the land. You may stop, if you 
will, to look at the tall Spanish houses, with their 
piazzas and jalousies, and the motley populace, French, 
Basques, Spaniards, Jews; and, most worth seeing of 
all, the lovely ladies of Bayonne, who swarm out 
when the sun goes down, for air and military music. 
You may try to find (in which you will probably fail) 
the arms of England in the roof of the ugly old 
cathedral ; you may wander over the bridges which 
join the three quarters of the city (for the Adour and 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



the Nive meet within the walls), and probably lose 
your way — a slight matter among folk who, if you 
will but take off your hat, call them Monsieur, 
apologize for the trouble you are giving, begin the 
laugh at your own stupidity, and compliment them 
on their city and their fair ladies, will be delighted 
to walk a mile out of their own way to show you 
yours. You will gaze up at the rock-rooted citadel 
from whence, in the small hours of April 14, 1813, 
after peace was agreed on, but unhappily not declared 
(for Napier has fully exculpated the French Generals), 
three thousand of Thouvenot's men burst forth against 
Sir John Hope's unsuspecting besiegers, with a furious 
valour which cost the English more than 800 men. 

There, in the pine woods on the opposite side, is the 
Boucault, where our besieging army lay. Across the 
reach below stretched Sir John Hope's famous bridge ; 
and as you leave Bayonne by rail, you run beneath 
the English cemetery, where lie the soldiers (officers 
of the Coldstream Guards among them) who fell in 
the Frenchman's last struggle to defend his native 
land. 

But enough of this. I should not have recalled to 
mind one of these battles, had they not, one and all, 
been as glorious for the French and their great captain 
— wearied with long marches, disheartened by the 
apathy of their own countrymen, and, as they went on, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



overpowered by mere numbers — as they were for our 
veterans, and Wellington himself. 

And now, once through Bayonne, we are in the 
Pignadas and the Landes. 

To form a conception of these famous Landes, it is 
only necessary to run down by the South- Western 
Eailway, through the moors of Woking or Ascot; 
spread them out flat, and multiply them to seeming 
infinity. The same sea of brown heather, broken only 
by the same dark pignadas, or fir plantations, extends 
for nigh a hundred miles ; and when the traveller 
northward has lost sight, first of the Spanish moun- 
tains, and then of the Pyrenean snows, he seems to be 
rushing along a brown ocean, without wave or shore- 
Only, instead of the three heaths of Surrey and Hants 
'the same species as those of Scotland), larger and 
richer southern heaths cover the grey sands ; and 
notably the delicate upright spires of the bruyere, or 
Erica scoparia, which grows full six feet high, and 
furnishes from its roots those 'bruyere' pipes, which 
British shopkeepers have rechristened ' briar-roots.' 
Instead, again, of the Scotch firs of Ascot, the pines 
are all pinasters (miscalled P. maritima). Each has 
ihe same bent stem, carrying at top, long, ragged, 
scanty, leaf-tufts, instead of the straight stem and 
dense short foliage of the sturdier Scotchman; and 
dow T n each stem runs a long, fresh scar, and at the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



bottom (in spring at least), hangs a lip of tin, and a 
neat earthen pipkin, into which distils turpentine as 
clear as glass. The trees have mostly been planted 
within the last fifty years, to keep the drifting sands 
from being blown away. As timber they are about as 
valuable as those Jersey cow-cabbage stalks, of which 
the curious will at times make walking-sticks : but as 
producers of turpentine they have their use, and give 
employment to the sad, stunted, ill-fed folk, unhealthy 
for want of water, and barbarous from utter loneliness, 
whose only employment, in old times, was the keeping 
ragged flocks about the moors. Few and far between 
the natives may be seen from the railway, seemingly 
hung high in air, till on nearer approach you find them 
to be stalking along on stilts, or standing knitting on 
the same, a sheepskin over their shoulders, an umbrella 
strapped to their side, and, stuck into the small of the 
back, a long crutch, which serves, when resting, as a 
third wooden leg. 

So run on the Landes, mile after mile, station after 
station, varied only by an occasional stunted cork tree, 
or a starved field of barley or maize. But the railroad 
is bringing to them, as elsewhere, labour, civilization, 
agricultural improvement. Pretty villages, orchards, 
gardens, are springing up round the lonely ' gares ' 
The late Emperor helped forward, it is said, new pine 
plantations, and sundry schemes for reclaiming the 



192 PBOSE IDYLLS. 



waste. Arcachon, on a pine-fringed lagoon of the 
Atlantic, has great artificial ponds for oyster breeding, 
and is rising into a gay watering-place, with a dis- 
tinguished scientific society. Nay, more : it saw a few 
years since an international exposition of fish, and fish- 
culture, and fishing-tackle, and all things connected 
with the fisheries, not only of Europe, but of America 
likewise. Heaven speed the plan ; and restore thereby 
oysters to our shores, and shad and salmon to the 
rivers both of Western Europe and Eastern North 
America. 

As for the cause of the Landes, it may be easily 
divined, by the help of a map and of common sense. 

The Gironde and the Adour carry to the sea the 
drainage of nearly a third of France, including almost 
all the rain which falls on the north side of the 
Pyrenees. What has become of all the sand and mud 
which has been swept in the course of ages down their 
channels ? What has become — a very small part, be it 
recollected, of the whole amount — of all the rock which 
has been removed by rain and thunder, frost and snow, 
in the process of scooping out the deep valleys of the 
Pyrenees ? Out of that one crack, which men call the 
Val d'Ossan, stone has been swept enough to form a 
considerable island. Where is it all ? In these 
Landes. Carried down year by year to the Atlantic, 
it has been driven back again, year by year, by the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



fierce gales of the Bay of Biscay, and' rolled up into 
banks and dunes of loose sand, till it has filled up what 
was once a broad estuary, 140 miles across and perhaps 
70 miles in depth. Upheaved it may have been also, 
slowly, from the sea, for recent sea -shells are found as 
far inland as Dax ; and thus the whole upper end of 
the Bay of Biscay has transformed itself during the 
lapse of, it may be, countless ages, into a desolate wil- 



It is at Dax that we leave the main line, and instead 
of running north for Bordeaux and the land of clarets, 
turn south-east to Orthez and Pau, and the Gaves, and 
the Pyrenees. 

And now we pass through ragged uplands, woody 
and moorish, with the long yellow maize-stalks of 
last year's crop rotting in the swampy glens. For 
the 'petite culture,' whatever be its advantages, gives 
no capital or power of combined action for draining wet 
lands ; and the valleys of Gascony and Beam in the 
south, as well as great- sheets of the Pas de Calais in 
the north, are in a waterlogged state, equally shocking 
to the eye of a British farmer, and injurious to the 
health and to the crops of the peasants. 
' Soon we strike the Adour, here of the shape and 
size of a second-class Scotch salmon-stream, with 
swirling brown pools beneath grey crags, which make 
one long to try in them the virtues of 'Jock Scott,' 

K 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



' the Batcher/ or the ' Dusty Miller.' And perhaps not 
without effect ; for salmon are there still ; and will be 
more and more as French ' pisciculture ' develops itself 
under Government supervision. 

Here we touch again the line of that masterly 
retreat of Soult's before the superior forces of Welling- 
ton, to which Napier has done such ample and deserved 
justice. 

There is Berenz, where the Sixth and Light divisions 
crossed the Gave, and clambered into the high road up 
steep ravines ; and there is Orthez itself, with the beau- 
tiful old Gothic bridge which the French could not 
blow up, as they did every other bridge on their retreat; 
and the ruins of that robber den to which Gaston 
Phoebus, Count of Foix (of whom you may read in 
Froissart), used to drag his victims ; and there over- 
head, upon the left of the rail and road, is the old 
Roman camp, and the hill of Orthez, and St. Boes, and 
the High Church of Baights, the scene of the terrible 
battle of Orthez. 

The Roman camp, then ' open and grassy, with a few 
trees,' says Napier, is now covered with vineyards. 
Everywhere the fatal slopes are rich with cultivation, 
plenty, and peace. God grant they may remain so for 
ever. 

And so, along the Gave de Pau, we run on to Pau, 
the ancient capital of Beam ; the birthplace of Henri 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



Quatre, and of Bernadotte, King of Sweden ; where, in 
the charming old chateau, restored by Louis Philippe, 
those who list may see the tortoise which served as the 
great Henry's cradle ; and believe, if they list also, the 
tale that that is the real shell. 

For in 1793, when the knights of the 'bonnet rouge' 
and ' carmagnole complete ' burst into the castle, to 
destroy every memorial of hated royalty, the shell 
among the rest, there chanced — miraculous coincidence 
— to be in Pau, in the collection of a naturalist, another 
shell, of the same shape and size. Swiftly and deftly 
pious hands substituted it for the real relic, leaving it 
to be battered in pieces and trampled in the mud, while 
the royal cradle lay perdu for years in the roof of a 
house, to reappear duly at the Restoration 6f the 
Bourbons. 

Of Pau I shall say nothing. It would be real im- 
pertinence in one who only spent three days in it, to 
describe a city which is known to all Europe ; which is 
a permanent English colony, and boasts of • one, and 
sometimes two, packs of English fox-hounds. But this 
I may be allowed to say. That of all delectable spots I 
have yet seen, Pau is the most delectable. Of all the 
landscapes which I have beheld, that from the Place 
Iioyale is, for variety, richness, and grandeur, the most 
glorious ; at least as I saw it for the first time. 

Beneath the wall of the high terrace are rich 

02 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



meadows, vocal with frogs rejoicing in the rain, and 
expressing their joy, not in the sober monotone of our 
English frogs, but each according to his kind ; one 
bellowing, the next barking, the next cawing, and the 
next (probably the little green Hylas, who has come 
down out of the trees to breed) quacking in treble like 
a tiny drake. The bark (I suspect) is that of the 
gorgeous edible frog ; and so suspect the young recruits 
who lounge upon the wall, and look down wistfully, 
longing, I presume, to eat him. And quite right they 
are ; for he (at least his thigh) is exceeding good to eat, 
tenderer and sweeter than any spring chicken. 

Beyond the meadow, among the poplars, the broad 
Gave murmurs on over, shingly shallows, between 
aspen-fringed islets, grey with the melting snows ; 
and beyond her again rise broken wooded hills, dotted 
with handsome houses ; and beyond them a veil of 
mist and rain. 

On a sudden that veil lifts ; and five-and-twenty 
miles away, beneath the black edge of the cloud, 
against the clear blue sky, stands out the whole snow- 
range of the Pyrenees; and in the midst, exactly 
opposite, filling up a vast gap which is the Val d'Ossan, 
the huge cone, still snowy white, of the Pic du Midi. 

He who is conversant with theatres will be unable to 
overlook the seeming art — and even artifice — of such 
an effect. The clouds lift like a drop-scene ; the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



mountains are so utterly unlike any natural object in 
the north, that for the moment one fancies them painted 
and not real ; the Pic du Midi stands so exactly where' 
it ought, and is yet so fantastic and unexpected in its 
shape, that an artist seems to have put it there. 

But he who knows nothing, and cares less, about 
theatres and their sham glories, and sees for the first 
time in his life the eternal snows of which he has read 
since childhood, draws his breath deeply, and stands 
astounded, whispering to himself that God is great. 

One hint more, ere we pass on from Pau. Here, at 
least in spring time, of all places in Europe, may a 
man feed his ears with song of birds. The copses by 
the Gave, the public walks and woods (wherein English 
prejudices have happily protected what is elsewhere 
shot down as game, even to the poor little cock-robins 
whose corpses lie by dozens in too many French 
markets), are filled with all our English birds of 
passage, finding their way northwards from Morocco 
and Algiers ; and with our English nightingales, black- 
caps, willow-wrens, and whitethroats, are other song- 
sters which never find their way to these isles, for 
which you must consult the pages of Mr. Gould or Mr. 
P>ree — and chief among them the dark Orpbeus, and 
the yellow Hippolais, surpassing the blackcap, and 
almost equalling the nightingale, for richness and 
variety of song — the polyglot warbler which penetrates, 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



in summer, as far north as the shores of the British 
Channel, and there stops short, scared by the twenty 
miles of sea, after a land journey — and by night, too, as 
all the warblers journey — from Africa. 

At Pau, the railroad ended when I was there; and 
who would go eastward had to take carriage, and go by 
the excellent road (all public roads in the south of 
France are excellent, and equal to our best English 
roads) over the high Landes to Tarbes ; and on again 
over fresh Landes to Montrejean ; and thence by rail- 
way to Toulouse. 

They are very dreary, these high flat uplands, from 
which innumerable streams pour down to swell the 
Adour and the Garonne ; and as one rolls along, listen- 
ing to the eternal tinkle of the horse-bells, only two 
roadside objects are particularly worthy of notice. First, 
the cultivation, spreading rapidly since the Eevolution, 
over what was open moor ; and next the great natural 
parks which one traverses here and there ; the remnants 
of those forests which were once sacred to the seigneurs 
and their field sports. The seigneurs are gone now, and 
the game with them ; and the forests are almost gone — 
so ruinate, indeed, by the peasantry, that the Govern- 
ment (I believe) has interfered to stop a destruction of 
timber, which involves the destruction both of fire-wood 
and of the annual fall of rain. But the trees which 
remain, whether in forest or in homestead, are sadly 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



"mangled. The winters are sharp in these high uplands, 
and firing scarce ; and the country method of obtaining 
it is to send a woman up a tree, where she hacks off, 
with feeble arms and feeble tools, boughs half-w T ay out 
from the stem, disfiguring, and in time destroying by 
letting the wet enter, splendid southern oaks, chestnuts, 
and walnuts. Painful and hideous, to an eye accus- 
tomed to British parks, are the forms of these once 
noble trees. 

Suddenly we descend a brow into the Vale of Tarbes : 
a good land and large; a labyrinth of clear streams, 
water-meadows, cherry-orchards, and crops of every 
kind, and in the midst the pleasant old city, with its 
once famous University. Of Tarbes, you may read in the 
pages of Froissart — or, if you prefer a later authority, 
in those of Dumas, ' Trois Mousquetaires ;' for this is 
the native land of the immortal Ulysses of Gascony, 
the Chevalier d'Artagnan. 

There you may see, to your surprise, not only gentle- 
men, but ladies, taking their pleasure on horseback 
after the English fashion ; for there is close by a great 
' haras,' or Government establishment for horse-breed- 
ing. You may watch the quaint dresses in the market- 
place ; you may rest, as Froissart rested of old, in a 
' right pleasant inn ;' you may eat of the delicious cookery 
which is to be found, even in remote towns, through- 
out the south of France, and even — if you dare — of 



200 PBOSE IDYLLS. . 



' Coquilles aux Champignons.' You may sit out after 
dinner in that delicious climate, listening to the rush 
of the clear Adour through streets, and yards, and 
culverts ; for the city, like Eomsey, or Salisbury, is , 
built over many streams. You may watch the Pyrenees 
changing from white to rose, from rose to lead colour, 
and then dying away into the night — for twilight there 
is little or none, here in the far south. 

' The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out, 
At one stride comes the dark.' 

And soon from street to street you hear the ' clarion ' 
of the garrison, that singularly wild and sweet trumpet- 
call which sends French soldiers to their beds. And 
at that the whole populace swarms out, rich and poor, 
and listens entranced beneath the trees in the Place 
Maubourguet, as if they had never heard it before ; 
with an order and a sobriety, and a good humour, and 
a bowing to each other, and asking and giving of cigar- 
lights between men of every class — and a little quiet 
modest love-making on the outskirts of the crowd, which 
is very pleasant to behold. And when the music is 
silent, and the people go off suddenly, silently, and 
soberly withal (for there are no drunkards in these 
parts), to their early beds, you stand and look up 
into the 'purple night,' as Homer calls it — that 
southern sky, intensely dark, and yet transparent 



FBOM OCEAN TO SEA. 201 

withal, through which you seem to look beyond the 
stars into the infinite itself, and recollect that beyond 
all that, and through all that likewise, there is an 
infinite good God who cares for all these simple kindly 
folk ; and that by Him all their hearts are as well 
known, and all their infirmities as mercifully weighed, 
as are, you trust, your own. 

And so you go to rest, content to say, with the wise 
American, ' It takes all sorts to make a world.' 

The next morn you rise, to roll on over yet more 
weary uplands to Montrejean, over long miles of 
sandy heath, a magnified Aldershott, which during 
certain summer months is gay, here and there, like 
Aldershott, with the tents of an army at play. But 
in spring the desolation is utter, and the loneliest 
grouse-moor, and the boggiest burn, are more cheerful 
and varied than the Landes of Lannemezan, and the 
foul streamlets which have sawn gorges through the 
sandy waste. 

But all the while, on your right hand, league after 
league, ever fading into blue sky behind you, and 
growing afresh out of blue sky in front, hangs high in 
air the white saw of the Pyrenees. High, I say, in 
air, for the land slopes, or seems to slope, down from 
you to the mountain range, and all their roots are lost 
in a dim sea of purple haze. But shut out the snow 
line above, and you will find that the seeming haze 



PMOSE IDYLLS. 



is none, but really a clear and richly varied distance 
of hills, and woods, and towns, which have become 
invisible from the contrast of their greens, and greys, 
and purples, with the glare and dazzle of the spotless 
snows of spring. 

There they stand, one straight continuous jagged 
wall, of which no one point seems higher than another. 
From the Pic d'Ossan, by the Mont Perdu and the 
Maladetta to the Pic de Lart, are peaks past counting — 
hard clear white against the hard clear blue, and 
blazing with keen light beneath the high southern 
sun. Each peak carries its little pet cushion of cloud, 
hanging motionless a few hundred yards above in the 
blue sky, a row of them as far as eye can see. But, 
ever and anon, as afternoon draws on, one of those 
little clouds, seeming tired of waiting at its post ever 
since sunrise, loses its temper, boils, swells, settles 
down on its own private peak, and explodes in a fierce 
thunderstorm down its own private valley, without 
discomposing in the least its neighbour cloud-cushions 
right and left. Faintly the roll of the thunder reaches 
the ear. Across some great blackness of cloud and 
cliff, a tiny spark darts down. A long wisp of mist 
sweeps rapidly toward you across the lowlands, and a 
momentary brush of cold rain lays the dust And 
then the pageant is played out, and the disturbed peak 
is left clear again in the blue sky for the rest of the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



day, to gather another cloud-cushion when to-morrow's 
sun shall rise. 

To him who looks, day after day, on this astonish- 
ing natural wall, stretching, without visible gap, for 
nearly three hundred miles, it is easy to see why 
France not only is, but must be, a different world 
from Spain. Even human thought cannot, to any 
useful extent, fly over that great wall of homeless 
rock and snow. On the other side there must needs 
be another folk, with another tongue, other manners, 
other politics, and if not another creed, yet surely with 
other, and utterly different, conceptions of the universe, 
and of man's business therein. Eailroads may do 
somewhat. But what of one railroad ; or even of two, 
one on the ocean, one on the sea, two hundred and 
seventy miles apart ? Before French civilization can 
inform and elevate the Spanish people you must 
' plane down the Pyrenees.' 

At Montrejean, a pretty town upon a hill which 
overhangs the Garonne, you find, again, verdure and 
a railroad ; and, turning your back upon the Pyrenees, 
run down the rich ugly vale of the Garonne, through 
crops of exceeding richness — wheat, which is reaped in 
July, to be followed by buckwheat reaped in October ; 
then by green crops to be cut in May, and that again 
by maize, to be pulled in October, and followed by 
wheat and the same rotation. 



204 PROSE IDYLLS. 



Thus you reach Toulouse, a noble city, of which 
it ill befits a passer-through to speak. Volumes have 
been written on its antiquities, and volumes on its 
history ; and all of either that my readers need know, 
they will find in Murray's hand-book. 

At Toulouse — or rather on leaving it to go eastward 
— you become aware that you have passed into a fresh 
region. The change has been, of course, gradual : but 
it has been concealed from you by passing over the 
chilly dreary uplands of Lannemezan. Now you find 
yourself at once in Languedoc. You have passed from 
the Atlantic region into the Mediterranean ; from the 
old highlands of the wild Vascones, into those lowlands 
of Gallia Narbonensis, reaching from the head-waters 
of the Garonne to the mouths of the Ehone, which 
were said to be more Italian than Italy itself. 

The peculiarity of the district is its gorgeous colour- 
ing. Everywhere, over rich plains, you look away to 
low craggy banks of limestone, the grey whereof 
contrasts strongly with the green of the lowland, 
and with the even richer green of the mulberry 
orchards ; and beyond them again, southward to the 
now distant snows of the Pyrenees, and northward to 
the orange downs and purple glens of the Cevennes, 
all blazing in the blazing sun. Green, grey, orange, 
purple, and, in the farthest distance, blue as of the 
heaven itself, make the land one vast rainbow, and fit 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



dwelling-place for its sunny folk, still happy and in- 
dustrious — once the most cultivated and luxurious 
people in Europe. 

As for their industry, it is hereditary. These lands 
were, it may be, as richly and carefully tilled in the 
days of Augustus Csesar as they are now ; or rather, as 
they were at the end of the eighteenth century. For, 
since then, the delver and sower — for centuries the 
slave of the Eoman, and, for centuries after, the slave 
of Teutonic or Saracenic conquerors — has become his 
own master, and his own landlord; and an impulse 
has been given to industry, which is shown by trim 
cottages, gay gardens, and fresh olive orchards, pushed 
up into glens which in a state of nature would starve 
a goat. 

The special culture of the country — more and more 
special as we run eastward — is that of the mulberry, 
the almond, and the olive. Along every hill-side, 
down every glen, lie orchard-rows of the precious 
pollards. The mulberries are of richest dark velvet 
green ; the almonds, one glory of rose-colour in early 
spring, are now of a paler and colder green ; the olives 
(as all the world knows) of a dusty grey, which looks 
all the more desolate in the pruning time of early 
spring, when half the boughs of the evergreen are cut 
out, leaving the trees stripped as by a tempest, and 
are carried home for fire-wood in the quaint little carts, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



with their solid creaking wheels, drawn by dove- 
coloured kine. Very ancient are some of these olives, 
or rather, olive-groups. For when the tree grows old, 
it splits, and falls asunder, as do often our pollard 
willows ; the bark heals over on the inside of each 
fragment, and what was one tree becomes many, 
springing from a single root, and bearing such signs 
of exceeding age that one can well believe the country 
tale, how in the olive grounds around Nismes are 
still fruiting olives which have furnished oil for 
the fair Eoman dames who cooled themselves in the 
sacred fountain of Nemausa, in the dnys of the twelve 
Caesars. 

Between the pollard rows are everywhere the rows of 
vines, or of what will be vines when summer comes, but 
are now black knobbed and gnarled clubs, without a 
sign of life save here and there one fat green shoot of 
leaf and tendril bursting forth from the seemingly 
dead stick. 

One who sees that sight may find a new meaning 
and beauty in the mystic words, ' I am the vine, ye 
are the branches.' It is not merely the connection 
between branch and stem, common to all trees; not 
merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring pro- 
perties of the grape, which made the very heathens look 
upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special 
gift of God ; not merely the pruning out of the unfruit- 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



ful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or — after the old 
Eomari fashion, which I believe endures still in these 
parts — buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem ; 
not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine, 
shorn of all its beauty, its fruitful ness, of every branch 
and twig which it had borne the year before, and left 
unsightly and seemingly ruined, to its winter's sleep ; 
and then bursting forth again, by an irresistible inward 
life, into fresh branches spreading and trailing far and 
wide, and tossing their golden tendrils to the sun. 

This thought, surely — the emblem of the living 
Church springing from the corpse of the dead Christ, 
who yet should rise and be alive for evermore — enters 
into, it may be forms an integral part of, the meaning 
of, that prophecy of all prophecies. 

One ought to look, with something of filial reverence, 
on the agriculture of the district into which we are 
penetrating; for it is the parent of our own. From 
hence, or strictly speaking from the Mediterranean 
shore beyond us, spread northward and westward 
through France, Belgium, and Britain, all the tillage 
which we knew — at least till a hundred years ago — 
beyond the primaeval plan of clearing, or . surface- 
burning, the forests, growing miserable white crops as 
long as they would yield, and then letting the land 
relapse, for twenty years, into miserable pasture. This 
process (which lingered thirty years ago in remote parts 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



of Devon), and nothing better, seems to have been that 
change of cultivated lands which Tacitus ascribes to 
the ancient Germans. Botation of crops, in any true 
sense, came to us from Provence and Languedoc; and 
with it, subsoiling ; irrigation ; all our artificial grasses, 
with lucerne at the head of the list ; our peas and 
beans ; some of our most important roots ; almost all 
our garden flowers, vegetables, fruits, the fig, the mul- 
berry, the vine — (the olive and the maize came with 
them from the East, but dared go no further north) — 
and I know not what more ; till we may say, that 
— saving subsoil-draining, which their climate does not 
need — the ancestors of these good folks were better 
farmers fifteen hundred years ago, than too many of 
our countrymen are at this day. 

So they toil, and thrive, and bless God, under the 
g'oiious sun ; and as for rain — they have not had rain 
for these two months — (I speak of April, 1864) — and, 
though the white limestone dust is ankle deep on every 
road, say that they want none for two months more > 
thanks, it is to be presumed, to their deep tillage, 
which puts the plant-roots out of the reach of drought. 
In spring they feed their silkworms, and wind their 
silk. In summer they reap their crops, and hang the 
maize-heads from their rafters for their own winter 
food, while they sell the wheat to the poor creatures, 
objects of their pity, who live in towns, and are forced 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



to eat white bread. From spring to autumn they have 
fruit, and to spare, for themselves and for their cus- 
tomers; and with the autumn comes the vintage, and 
all its classic revelries. A happy folk — under a happy 
clime ; which yet has its drawbacks, like all climes on 
earth. Terrible thunderstorms sweep over it, hail-laden, 
killing, battering, drowning, destroying in an hour the 
labours of the year ; and there are ugly mistral winds 
likewise, of which it may be fairly said, that he who 
can face an eight days' mistral, without finding his life 
a burden, must be either a very valiant man, or have 
neither liver nor mucous membrane. 

For on a sudden, after still and burning weather, the 
thermometer suddenly falls from thirty to forty degrees ; 
and out of the north-west rushes a chilly hurricane, 
blowing fiercer and fiercer each day toward nightfall, 
and lulling in the small hours, only to burst forth again 
at sunrise. Parched are all lips and eyes ; for the air 
is full of dust, yea, even of gravel which cuts like 
hail. Aching are all right-sides ; for the sudden chill 
brings on all manner of liver complaints and indiges- 
tions. All who can afford it, draw tight the jalousies, 
and sulk in darkness ; the leaves are parched, as by an 
Atlantic gale ; the air is filled with lurid haze, as in an 
English north-east wind ; and no man can breathe freely, 
or eat his bread with joy, until the plague is past. 
What is the cause of these mistrals ; why all the cold 
K P 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



air of Central France should be suddenly seized with 
madness, and rush into the sea between the Alps and 
the Pyrenees ; whether the great heat of the sun, 
acting on the Mediterranean basin, raises up thence — 
as from the Gulf of Mexico — columns of warm light 
air, whose place has to be supplied by colder and 
heavier air from inland; whether the north-west mistral 
is, or is not, a diverted north-easter ; an arctic current 
which, in its right road toward the tropics across the 
centre of France, has been called to the eastward of 
the Pyrenees (instead of, as usual, to the westward), 
by the sudden demand for cold air, — all this let men 
of science decide ; and having discovered what causes 
the mistral, discover also what will prevent it. That 
would be indeed a triumph of science, and a boon to 
tortured humanity. 

But after all, man is a worse enemy to man than 
any of the brute forces of nature : and a more terrible 
scourge than mistral or tempest swept over this land 
six hundred years ago, when it was, perhaps, the 
happiest and the most civilized portion of Europe. 
This was the scene of the Albigense Crusade : a 
tragedy of which the true history will never, perhaps, 
be written. It was not merely a persecution of real 
or supposed heretics ; it was a national war, embittered 
by the ancient jealousies of race, between the Frank 
aristocracy of the north and the Gothic aristocracy 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



of the south, who had perhaps acquired, with their 
half-Roman, half-Saracen civilization, mixtures both 
of Eoman and of Saracen blood. As " Aquitanians," 
" Provencaux," — Eoman Provincials, as they proudly 
called themselves, speaking the Langue d'Oc, and 
looking down on the northerners who spoke the Langue 
d'Oil as barbarians, they were in those days guilty of 
the capital crime of being foreigners ; and as foreigners 
they were exterminated. What their religious tenets 
were, we shall never know. With the Vaudois, Wal- 
denses, "poor men of Lyons," they must not be for a 
moment confounded. Their creed remains to us only 
in the calumnies of their enemies. The confessions 
in the archives of the Tolosan Inquisition, as elicited 
either under torture or fear of torture, deserve no con- 
fidence whatsoever. And as for the licentiousness of 
their poetry — which has been alleged as proof of their 
profligacy — I can only say, that it is no more licen- 
tious than the fabliaux of their French conquerors, 
while it is far more delicate and refined. Human- 
ity, at least, has done justice to the Troubadours of 
the south ; and confessed, even in the Middle Age, 
that to them the races of the north owed grace of 
expression, delicacy of sentiment, and that respect 
for women which soon was named chivalry ; which 
looks on woman, not with suspicion and contempt, 
but with trust and adoration ; and is not ashamed 

p 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



to obey her as " mistress," instead of treating her as a 
slave. 

But these Albigenses must have had something in 
their hearts for which it was worth while to die. At 
Aviguonet, that little grey town on the crag above the 
railway, they burst into the place, maddened by the 
cruelties of the Inquisitor (an archdeacon, if I recollect 
rightly, from Toulouse), and slew him then and there. 
They were shut up in the town, and withstood heroically 
a long and miserable siege. At last they were starved 
out. The conquerors offered them their lives — so say 
the French stories — if they would recant. But they 
would not. They were thrust together into one of those 
stone-walled enclosures below the town, heaped over 
with vine-twigs and maize-stalks, and burned alive ; 
and among them a young lady of the highest rank, who 
had passed through all the horrors of the siege, and 
was offered life, wealth, and honour, if she would tura. 

Surely profligate infidels do not so die ; and these 
poor souls, whatever were their sins or their confusions, 
must be numbered among the heroes of the human 
race. 

But the world has mended since then, and so has the 
French character. Even before the Ptevolution of 1793, 
it was softening fast. The massacres of 1562 were not 
as horrible as those of the Albigense Crusade, though 
committed — which the former were not — under severe 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



provocation. The massacres of 1793 — in spite of all 
that has been said — were far less horrible than those 
of 1562, though they were the outpouring of centuries 
■of pardonable fury and indignation. The crimes of 
the Terreur Blanche, at the Eestoration — though ugly 
things were done in the south, especially in Nismes — 
were far less horrible again ; though they were, for the 
most part, acts of direct personal retaliation on the 
republicans of 1793. And since then the Trench 
heart has softened fast. The irritating sense of here- 
ditary wrong has passed away. The Frenchman con- 
ceives that justice is done to him, according to his own 
notions thereof. He has his share of the soil, without 
which no Celtic populace will ever be content. He has 
fair play in the battle of life ; and a ' Carriere ouverte 
aux talens.' He has equal law and justice between 
man and man. And he is content ; and under the 
sunshine of contentment and self-respect, his native 
good-nature expands; and he shows himself what he 
is, not merely a valiant and capable, but an honest, 
kindly, charitable man. 

Yes. Trance has grown better, and has been grow- 
ing better, I believe, for centuries past. And the 
difference between the Trance of the middle age and 
the Trance of the present day, is fitly typified by 
the difference between the new Carcassone below and 
the old Carcassone above, where every traveller, even 



PROSE I'DYLLS. 



if lie be no antiquarian, should stop and gaze about 
a while. 

The contrast is complete ; and one for which a man 
who loves his fellow-men should surely return devout 
thanks to Almighty God. Below, on the west bank of 
the river, is the new town, spreading and growing, 
unwalled, for its fortifications are now replaced by 
boulevards and avenues ; full of handsome houses ; 
squares where, beneath the plane-tree shade, marble 
fountains pour out perpetual health and coolness ; 
manufactories of gay woollens; healthy, cheerful, market 
folk ; comfortable burghers ; industry and peace. We 
pass outside to the great basin of the Canal de Langue- 
doc, and get more avenues of stately trees, and among 
them the red marble statue of Kiquet, whose genius 
planned and carried out the mighty canal which joins 
the ocean to the sea ; the wonder of its day, which 
proved the French to be, at least in the eighteenth cen- 
tury, the master-engineers of the world; the only people 
who still inherited the mechanical skill and daring 
of their Koman civilizers. Eiquet bore the labour of 
that canal — and the calumny and obstructiveness, too, 
which tried to prevent its formation ; France bore the 
expense ; Louis Quatorze, of course, the glory ; and no 
one, it is to be feared, the profit : for the navigation of 
the Garonne at the one extremity, and of the Mediter- 
ranean shallows at the other, were left unimproved till 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



of late years, and the eaual has become practically use- 
ful only just in time to "be superseded by the railroads. 

Now cross the Aude. Look down upon the willow 
and aspen copses, where over the heads of busy 
washerwomen, the nightingale and the hippolais 
crowded together away from the dusty plains and 
downs, shake the copses with their song; and then 
toil upward to the grey fortress tower on the grey 
limestone knoll ; and pass, out of nature and her pure 
sunshine, into the black shadow of the unnatural 
Middle Age ; into the region of dirt and darkness, 
cruelty and fear; grim fortresses, crowded houses, 
narrow streets, and pestilence. Pass through the outer 
circle of walls, of the latter part of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, to examine — for their architecture is a whole 
history engraved in stones — the ancient walls of the 
inner enceinte; massive Eoman below, patched with 
striped Visigothic work, with mean and hasty Moorish, 
with graceful, though heavy, Romanesque of the times 
of the Troubadours ; a whole museum of ancient forti- 
fications, which has been restored, stone by stone, 
through the learning of M. Viollet le Due and the public 
spirit of the late Emperor. Pass in under the gateway 
and give yourself up to legends. There grins down on 
you the broad image of the mythic Dame Carcas, who 
defended the town single-handed against Charlemagne 
till this tower fell down by miracle, and let in the 



216 PROSE IDYLLS. 



Christian host. But do not believe that she gave to 
the place its name of Carcassone ; for the first syllable 
of the word is hint enough that it was, long ere her 
days, a Celtic caer, or hill-fortress. Pause at the inner 
gate; you need not exactly believe that when the 
English Crusader, Simon de Montfort, burst it open, 
and behold, the town within was empty and desolate, 
he cried : ' Did I not tell you that these heretics were 
devils ; and behold, being devils, they have vanished 
into air.' You must believe, I fear, that of the great 
multitude who had been crowded, starving, and fever- 
stricken within, he found four hundred poor wretches 
who had lingered behind, and burnt them all alive. 
You need not believe that that is the mouth of the 
underground passage which runs all the way from the 
distant hills, through which the Vicomte de Beziers, 
after telling Simon de Montfort and the Abbot of 
Citeaux that he would sooner be flayed alive than 
betray the poor folk who had taken refuge with him, 
got them all safe away, men, women, and children. 
You need not believe that that great vaulted chamber 
was the ' Chamber of the Inquisition.' But you must 
believe that those two ugly rings let into the roof 
were put there for the torture of the cord; and that 
many a naked wretch has dangled from them ere now, 
confessing anything and everything that he — or, alas ! 
she — was bidden. But these and their like are the 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 217 

usual furniture of every mediaeval court of justice ; 
and torture was not altogether abolished in France 
till the latter part of the eighteenth century. You 
need not believe, again, that that circular tower on 
the opposite side of the town was really the 'Tower 
of the Inquisition ; ' for many a feudal lord, besides 
the Inquisitors, had their dens of cruelty in those old 
times. You need not even believe — though it is too 
likely to be true — that that great fireplace in the little 
first-floor room served for the torture of the scarpines. 
But you must believe that in that little round den 
beneath it, only approached by a trap in the floor, two 
skeletons were found fastened by those chains to that 
central pillar, having died and rotted forgotten in that 
horrid oubliette — how many centuries ago ? 

' Plusieurs ont gemis la bas,' said M. Viollet le Due's 
foreman of the works, as he led us out of that evil 
hole, to look, with eyes and hearts refreshed by the 
change, at a curious Visigothic tower, in which the 
good bishop Sidonius Apollinaris may have told of the 
last Burgundian invasion of his Auvergne to the good 
king Theodoric of the West Goths. 

If anyone wishes to learn what the Middle Ages 
were like, let him go to Carcassone and see. 

And now onward to Narbonne — or rather, to what 
was once Narbonne ; one of the earliest colonies ever 
founded by the Eomans ; then the capital of the "Visi- 



218 PROSE IDYL1S. 



gothic kingdom ; then of an Arab kingdom : now a 
dull fortified town — of a filth unspeakable, and not to 
be forgotten or forgiven. Stay not therein an hour, 
lest you take fever, or worse : but come out of the 
gate over the drawbridge, and stroll down the canal. 
Look back a moment, though, across the ditch. The 
whole face of the wall is a museum of Roman gods, 
tombs, inscriptions, bas-reliefs : the wreck of Martial's 
' Pulcherrima Narbo,' the old Eoman city, which was 
demolished by Louis XIIL, to build the ugly forti- 
fications of the then new fashion, now antiquated and 
useless. Take one glance, and walk on, to look at live 
Nature — far more interesting than dead Art. 

Everything fattens in the close damp air of the 
canal. The great fiat, with its heavy crops, puts you 
in mind of the richest English lowland — save for the 
total want of old meadows. The weeds on the bank 
are English in type, only larger and richer — as be- 
comes the climate. But as you look among them, 
you see forms utterly new and strange, whose kinship 
you cannot fancy, but which remind you that you 
are nearing Italy, and Greece, and Africa. And in 
the hedges are great bay-trees; and inside them, 
orchards of standard fig and white mulberry, with 
its long yearling shoots of glorious green — soon to 
be stripped bare for the silkworms ; and here and there 
long lines of cypresses, black against the bright green 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



plain and bright blue sky. No ; you are not in Britain. 
Certainly not ; for there is a drake (not a duck) quack- 
ing with feeble treble in that cypress, six feet over 
your head ; and in Britain drakes do not live in trees. 
You look for the climbing palmipede, and see nothing : 
nor will you see ; for the quacker is a tiny green tree- 
frog, who holds on by the suckers at the ends of his 
toes (with which he can climb a pane of glass, like a 
fly), and has learnt the squirrel's art' of going invisible, 
without ' the receipt of fern-seed,' by simply keeping 
always on the further side of the branch. 

But come back ; for the air even here is suggestive 
of cholera and fever. The uncleanliness of these 
Narbonnois is shameless and shocking; and ' immon- 
dices ' of every kind lie festering in the rainless heat. 
The sickened botanist retreats, and buys a bottle of 
Eau Bully — alias aromatic vinegar. 

There, crowding yon hill, with handsome houses and 
churches, is Beziers — the blood-stained city. Beneath 
the pavement of that church, it is said, lie heaped 
together the remains of thousands of men, women, 
and children, slaughtered around their own altars, on 
that fatal day, when the Legate Amalric, asked by 
the knights how they should tell Catholics from 
heretics, cried, ' Kill them all — the Lord will know 
his own." 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



We will pass on. We have had enough of horrors. 
And, beside, we are longing to hurry onward ; for we 
are nearing the Mediterranean now. There are small 
skiffs lying nnder the dark tower of Agde, another 
place of blood, fitly built of black lava blocks, the 
offspring of the nether pit. The railway cuts through 
rolling banks of dark lava; and now, ahead of us, is 
the conical lava-hill of Cette, and the mouth of the 
Canal du Midi. 

There it is, at last. The long line of heavenly blue ; 
and over it, far away, the white-peaked lateen sails, 
which we have seen in pictures since our childhood; 
and there, close to the rail, beyond the sand-hills, 
delicate wavelets are breaking for ever on a yellow 
beach, each in exactly the same place as the one which 
fell before. One glance shows us children of the 
Atlantic, that we are on a tideless sea. 

There it is, — the sacred sea. The sea of all civili- 
zation, and almost all history, girdled by the fairest 
countries in the world; set there that human beings 
from all its shores might mingle with each, other, and 
become humane — the sea of Egypt, of Palestine, of 
Greece, of Italy, of Byzant, of Marseilles, and this Nar- 
bonnaise, ' more Eoman than Eome herself,' to which we 
owe the greater part of our own progress ; the sea, too, 
of Algeria and Carthage, and Gyrene, and fair lands now 



FROM OCEAN TO SEA. 



desolate, surely not to be desolate for ever;— the sea 
of civilization. Not only to the Christian, nor to the 
classic scholar, but to every man to whom the progress 
of his race from barbarism toward humanity is dear, 
should the Mediterranean Sea be one of the most 
august and precious objects on this globe ; and the first 
sight of it should inspire reverence and delight, as of 
coming home — home to a rich inheritance in which he 
has long believed by hearsay, but which he sees at last 
with his own mortal corporal eyes. 

Exceedingly beautiful is that first view of the sea 
from Cette, though altogether different in charactei 
from the views of the Mediterranean which are common 
in every gallery of pictures. There is nothing to re- 
mind one of Claude, or Vernet, or Stanfield. No 
mountain-ranges far aloft, no cliffs toppling into the 
water, with convents and bastides perched on their 
crags; and seaports, with their land-locked harbours, 
and quaint lighthouses, nestling on the brink. That 
scenery begins on the other side of the Rhone mouth, 
and continues, I believe, almost without interruption, 
to the shores of Southern Palestine, one girdle of per- 
petual beauty. 

But here, the rail runs along a narrow strip of sand, 
covered with straggling vines, and tall white iris, be- 
tween the sea and the great Etang de Thau, a long 
narrow salt-lake, beyond which the wide lowlands of 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the Herault slide gently down. There is not a moun- 
tain, hardly a hill, visible for miles : but all around is 
the great sheet of blue glassy water: while the air is 
as glassy clear as the water, and through it, at seem- 
ingly immense distances, the land shows purple and 
orange, blue and grey, till the landscape is one great 
rainbow. "White ships slide to and from far-off towns ; 
fishermen lounge on the marshes, drying long lines of 
net. Everywhere is vastness, freedom, repose gentle 
and yet not melancholy ; because with all, under the 
burning blue, there is that fresh wholesome heat, which 
in itself is life, and youth, and joy. 

Beyond, nearer the mouths of the Ehone, there are, 
so men say, desolate marshes, tenanted by herds of 
half- wild horses ; foul mud-banks, haunted by the 
pelican and the flamingo, and waders from the African 
shore ; a region half land, half water, where dwell 
savage folk, decimated by fever and ague. But short 
of those Bounhes du Ehone, the railway turns to the 
north, toward Montpellier and 

' Arli, dove il Rhodano stagna. ' 

And at Cette ends this little tour from Ocean to Sea, 
with the wish that he who next travels that way may 
have as glorious weather, and as agreeable a com- 
panion, as the writer of these lines had in 1804. 



VI. 

NORTH DEVON. 



VI. 

NOBTH DEVON. 1 
I. — EXMOOE. 

We were riding up from Lynmouth, on a pair of 
ragged ponies, Claude Mellot and I, along the gorge 
of Watersmeet. And as we went we talked of many 
things ; and especially of some sporting book which we 
had found at the Lyndale Hotel the night before, and 
which we had not by any means admired. 2 I do not 
object to sporting books in general, least of all to one 
on Exmoor. No place in England is more worthy of 
one. There is no place whose beauties and peculiarities 
are more likely to be thrown into strong relief by being- 
looked at with a sportsman's eye. It is so with all 
forests and moorlands. The spirit of Eobin Hood and 
Johnny of Breadislee is theirs. They are remnants of 

i Fraser's Magazine, July 1S49. 

2 Some years after this was written, the very book which was needed 
appeared, as "The Chase of the Eed Deer," by Mr. Palk Collyns. 
K Q 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the home of man's fierce youth, still consecrated to the 
genius of animal excitement and savage freedom ; after 
all, not the most ignoble qualities of human nature. 
Besides, there is no better method of giving a living 
picture of a whole country than by taking some one fea- 
ture of it as a guide, and bringing all other observations 
into harmony with that original key. Even in merely 
scientific books this is very possible. Look, for in- 
stance, at Hugh Miller's ' Old Eed Sandstone,' ' The 
Voyage of the Beagle,' and Professor Forbes's work (we 
had almost said epic poem) on ' Glaciers.' Even an 
agricultural writer, if he have a real insight in him — if 
lie have anything of that secret of the pih neV uno, 
' the power of discovering the infinite in the finite ; ' of 
seeing, like a poet, trivial phenomena in their true 
relation to the whole of the great universe into which 
they are so cunningly fitted ; if he has learned to look 
at all tilings and men, down to the meanest, as living 
lessons written with the finger of God ; if, in short, he 
has any true dramatic power: then he may impart to that 
apparently muddiest of sciences a poetic or a humorous 
tone, and give the lie to Mephistopheles when he dis- 
suades Eaust from farming as an occupation too mean 
and filthy for a man of genius. The poetry of agri- 
culture remains as yet, no doubt, unwritten, and the 
comedy of it also ; though its farce-tragedy has been 
too often extensively enacted in practice — uncon- 



NORTH DEVON. 



sciously to the players. As for the old 'pastoral' 
school, it only nourished before agriculture really 
existed — that is, before sound science, hard labour, and 
economy were necessary — and has been for the last two 
hundred years simply a dream. Nevertheless, as signs 
of what may be done even now by a genial man with so 
stubborn a subject as 'turnips, barley, clover, wheat,' 
it is worth while to look at old Arthur Young's books, 
both travels and treatises ; and also at certain very 
spirited ' Chronicles of a Clay Farm,' by Talpa, which 
teem with humour and wisdom. 

In sporting liter --ure — a tenth muse, exclusively 
indigenous to England — the same observation holds 
good tenfold. Some of our most perfect topographical 
sketches have been the work of sportsmen. Old Izaak 
Walton, and his friend Cotton, of Dovedale, whose 
names will last as long as their rivers, have been fol- 
lowed by a long train of worthy pupils. White's ' His- 
tory of Selborne ; ' Sir Humphry Davy's ' Salmonia ; ' 
' The Wild Sports of the West ; ' Mr. St. John's charm- 
ing little works on Highland Shooting ; and, above all, 
Christopher North's ' Eecreations ' — delightful book ! 
to be read and re-read, the tenth time even as the first 
— an inexhaustible fairy well, springing out of the 
granite rock of the sturdy Scotch heart, through the 
tender green turf of a genial boyish old age. Sport- 
ing books, when they are not filled— as they need 

Q 2 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



never be — with low slang, and ugly sketches of ugly 
characters — who hang on to the skirts of the sporting 
world, as they would to the skirts of any other world, 
in default of the sporting one — form an integral and 
significant, and, it may be, an honourable and useful 
part, of the English literature of this day ; and, there- 
fore, all shallowness, vulgarity, stupidity, or book- 
making in that class, must be as severely attacked as in 
novels and poems. We English owe too much to our 
field sports to allow people to talk nonsense about them. 

Claude smiled at some such words of mine that day. 
' You talk often of the poetry of sport. I can see nothing 
in it but animal excitement, and a certain quantity, 
I suppose, of that animal cunning which the Eed Indian 
possesses in common with the wolf and the cat, and any 
other beast of prey. As a fact, the majority of sports- 
men are of the most unpoetical type of manhood.' 

' More unpoetical than the average man of business, 
or man of law, Claude? Or even than the average 
preacher ? I believe, on the contrary, that for most of 
them it is sport which at once keeps alive and satisfies 
what you would call their aesthetic faculties, and so — 
smile if you will — helps to make them purer, simpler, 
more genial men/ 

'Little enough of aesthetic appears either in their 
conversation or their writing.' 

' Esau is a dumb soul, especially here in England ; 



NORTH DEVON. 



but he has as deep a heart in him as Jacob, neverthe- 
less, and as tender. Do yon fancy that the gentleman 
over whose book we were grumbling last night, attached 
no more to his own simple words than you do ? His 
account of a stag's run looks bald enough to you : but 
to him (unless Diana struck him blind for intruding on 
her privacy) what a whole poem of memories there 
must be in those few words, — " Turned down * * 
"Water for a mile, and crossed the forest to Waters- 
meet, where he was run into after a gallant race." ' 

' A whole poem ? ' 

' Why not ? How can there be less, if he had eyes 
to see ? ' 

' Does he fancy that it is an account of a run to tell 
us that " Found at * * * * cover, held away at a slap- 
ping pace for * * * * Barn, then turned down the 

* * * Water for a mile, and crossed the Forest ; made 
for * * * Hill, but being headed, went by * * * * woods 
toD * * * where he was run into after a gallant race of 

* * * * hours and * * * * miles " ? It is nearly as 
dull as a history book ! ' 

' Nay, I never rode with those staghounds : and yet I 
can fill up his outline for him, wherever the stag was 
roused. Do you think that he never marked how the 
panting cavalcade rose and fell on the huge mile-long 
waves of that vast heather sea ; how one long brown 
hill after another sunk down, greyer and greyer, behind 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



them, and one long grey bill after another swelled up 
browner and browner before them ; and how the sand- 
stone rattled and flew beneath their feet, as the great 
horses, like Homer's of old, " devoured up the plain ;" and 
how they struggled down the hill- side, through bushes 
and rocks, and broad slipping rattling sheets of screes, 
and saw beneath them stag and pack galloping down 
the shallow glittering river-bed, throwing up the shingle, 
striking out the water in long glistening sheets ; and 
how they too swept after them, down the flat valley, 
rounding crag and headland, which opened one after 
another in interminable vista, along the narrow strip of 
sand and rushes, speckled with stunted, moss-bearded, 
heather-bedded hawthorns, between the great grim 
lifeless mountain walls ? Did he feel no pleasant creep- 
ing of the flesh that day at the sound of his own 
horse-hoofs, as they swept through the long ling with 
a sound as soft as the brushing of a woman's tresses, 
and then rang down on the spongy, black, reverberating 
soil, chipping the honey-laden fragrant heather blos- 
soms, and tossing them out in a rosy shower ? Or, if 
that were really too slight a thing for the observation of 
an average sportsman, surely he must recollect the dying 
away of the hounds' voices, as the 'woodland passes 
engulfed them, whether it were Brendon or at Badger- 
worthy, or any other place; how they brushed through 
the narrow forest paths, where the ashes were already 



NORTH DEVON. 231 

golden, while the oaks still kept their sombre green, and 
the red leaves and berries of the mountain-ash showed 
bright beneath the dark forest aisles ; and how all of a 
sudden the wild outcry before them seemed to stop and 
concentrate, thrown back, louder and louder as they 
rode, off the same echoing crag ; till at a sudden turn of 
the road there stood the stag beneath them in the stream, 
his back against the black rock with its green cushions of 
dripping velvet, knee-deep in the clear amber water, 
the hounds around him, some struggling and swimming 
in the deep pool, some rolling and tossing and splash- 
ing in a mad, half -terrified ring, as he reared into the 
air on his great haunches, with the sparkling beads 
running off his red mane, and dropping on his knees, 
plunged his antlers down among them, with blows 
which would have each brought certain death with it 
if the yielding water had not broken the shock. Do 
you think that he does not remember the death ? The 
huge carcass dragged out of the stream, followed by 
dripping, panting dogs ; the blowing of the mort, and the 
last wild halloo, when the horn-note and the voices rang 
through the autumn woods, and rolled up the smooth 
flat mountain sides; and Brendon answered Countis- 
bury, and Countisbury sent it on to Lynmouth hills, 
till it swept out of the gorge and died away upon the 
Severn sea ? And then, does he not remember the 
pause, and the revulsion, and the feeling of sadnes3 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



and littleness, almost of shame, as he looked tip for 
the first time — one can pardon his not having done so 
before — and saw where he was, and the beauty of 
the hill- sides, with the lazy autumn clouds crawling 
about their tops, and the great sheets of screes, glaciers 
of stone covering acres and acres of the smooth hill- 
side, eating far into the woods below, bowing down 
the oak scrubs with their weight, and the circular 
sweeps of down, flecked with innumerable dark spots 
of gorse, each of them guarded where they open into 
the river chasm by two fortresses of "giant-snouted 
crags," — delicate pink and grey sandstone, from which 
blocks and crumbling boulders have been toppling 
slowly down for ages, beneath the frost and the whirl- 
wind, and now lie in long downward streams upon 
the slope, as if the mountain had been weeping tears 
of stone? And then, as the last notes of the mort 
had died away, did not there come over him an awe at 
the silence of the woods, not broken, but deepened, 
by the unvarying monotone of the roaring stream 
beneath, which flashed and glittered, half-hidden in 
the dark chasm, in clear brown pools reflecting every 
leaf and twig, in boiling pits and walls of foam, 
ever changing, and yet for ever the same, fleeting 
on past the poor dead reeking stag and the silent 
hounds lying about on the moss-embroidered stones, 
their lolling tongues showing like bright crimson 



NORTH DEVON. 233 

sparkles in the deep rich Venetian air of the green 
sombre shades; while the startled water-ousel, with 
his white breast, flitted a few yards and stopped to 
stare from a rock's point at the strange intruders ; 
and a single stockdove, out of the bosom of the 
wood, began calling sadly and softly, with a dreamy 
peaceful moan 1 Did he not see and hear all this, for 
surely it was there to see and hear?' 

'Not he. The eye only sees that which it brings 
within the power of seeing ; and all I shall say of him 
is, that a certain apparition in white leathers was at one 
period of its appearance dimly conscious of equestrian 
motion towards a certain brown two-horned pheno- 
menon, and other spotted phenomena, at which he had 
been taught by habit to make the articulate noises 
" stag " and " hounds," among certain grey, and green, 
and brown phenomena, at which the same habit and 
the example of his fellows had taught him to say, 
" Eock, and wood, and mountain," and perhaps the 
further noises of " Lovely, splendid, majestic." ' 

' As usual, sir ! You dwellers in Babylon fancy 
that you have the monopoly of all the intellect, and 
all the taste, because you earn your livings by talking 
about pretty things, and painting pretty things : little 
do you suspect, shut up together in your little literary 
worlds, and your artistic worlds, how many thousands 
of us outside barbarians there are who see as clearly, 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



and enjoy as deeply as you do : but hold their tongues 
about their own feelings, simply because they have 
never been driven by emptiness of pocket to look round 
for methods of expressing them. And, after all — how 
much of nature can you express ? You confest your- 
self yesterday baffled by all the magnificence around 
you.' 

' Yes ! to paint it worthily one would require to be a 
Turner, a Copley Fielding, and a Creswick, all in one.' 

' And did you ever remark how such scenes as this 
gorge of the " Watersmeet " stir up a feeling of shame, 
almost of peevishness, before the sense of a mysterious 
meaning which we ought to understand and cannot 1 ' 

He smiled. 

' Our torments do by length of time become our 
elements ; and painful as that sensation is to the earnest 
artist, he will feel it, I fancy, at last sublime itself into 
an habitually gentle, reverent, almost melancholy tone 
of mind, as of a man bearing the burden of an infinite 
and wonderful message, which his own frivolity and 
laziness hinder him from speaking out.' 

' Then it should beget in him, too, something of mer- 
ciful indulgence towards the seeming stupidity of those 
who see, after all, only a very little shallower than he 
does into the unfathomable depths of nature.' 

' Well, sporting books and sportsmen seem to me, by 
their very object, not to be worth troubling our heads 



NOBTJS DEVON. 



about. Out of nothing, comes nothing. See, my 
hands are as soft as any lady's in Belgravia. I could 
not, to save my life, lift a hundredweight a foot off 
the ground; while you have been a wild man of the 
woods, a leaper of ditches, a rower of races, and a 
wanton destroyer of all animal life: and yet ' 

•' You would hint politely that you are as open as 
me to all noble, and chivalrous, and truly manly 
emotions ?' 

' What think you ? ' 

' That you are far worthier in such matters than I, 
friend. But do not forget that it may be your intellect, 
and your profession — in one word, Heaven's mercy — 
which have steered you clear of shoals upon which you 
will find the mass of our class founder. Woe to the 
class or the nation which has no manly physical train- 
ing! Look at the manners, the morals, the faces of 
the young men of the shopkeeping classes, if you wish 
to see the effects of utterly neglecting the physical de- 
velopment of man ; x of fancying that all the muscular 
activity he requires under the sun is to be able to stand 
behind a counter, or sit on a desk-stool without tum- 
bling off. Be sure, be sure, that ever since the days 
of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of 
cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in 
hand with them. To that utter neglect of any exer- 

1 Written before the Volunteer movement. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



cises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, 
and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sen- 
suality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high 
sense of honour, which is increasing just now among 
the middle classes ; and from which the navigator, the 
engineer, the miner, and the sailor are comparatively 
free.' 

'And perhaps, too, that similar want of a high 
sense of honour, which seems, from the religious perio- 
dicals, to pervade a large proportion of a certain more 
venerable profession ? ' 

' Seriously, Claude, I believe you are not far wrong. 
But we are getting on delicate ground there : however, 
I have always found, that of whatever profession he 
may be — to travestie Shakspeare's words, — 

" The man that hath not sporting in his soul, 
Is fit for treason's direst stratagems" 

and so forth.' 

' Civil to me ! ' 

' Oh, you have a sporting soul in you, like hundreds 
of other Englishmen who never handled rod or gun ; 
or you would not be steering for Exmoor to-day. If 
a lad be a genius, you may trust him to find some 
original means for developing his manly energies, 
whether in art, agriculture, science, or travels, dis- 
covery, and commerce. But if he be not, as there are 
a thousand chances to one he will not be, then what- 



NORTH DEVON. 237 



ever you teach him, let the two first things be, as they 
were with the old Persians, " To speak the truth, and 
to draw the bow." ' 

By this time we had reached the stream, just clear- 
ing from the last night's showers. A long trans- 
parent amber shallow, dimpled with fleeting silver 
rings by rising trout; a low cascade of green- veined 
snow ; a deep dark pool of swirling orange-brown, 
walled in with heathery rocks, and paved with sand- 
stone slabs and boulders, distorted by the changing 
refractions of the eddies, — sight delicious to the angler. 

I commenced my sport at once, while Claude wan- 
dered up the glen to sketch a knoll of crags, on which 
a half- wild moorland pony, the only living thing in sight, 
stood staring and snuffing at the intruder, his long 
mane and tail streaming out wildly against the sky. 

I had fished on for some hour or two ; Claude had 
long since disappeared among the hills; I fancied 
myself miles from any human being, when a voice at 
my elbow startled me : — 

'A bleak place for fishing this, sir!' 

I turned;, it was an old grey- whiskered labouring 
man, with pick and spade on shoulder, who had crept 
on me unawares beneath the wall of the neighbouring 
deer-cover. Keen honest eyes gleamed out from his 
brown, scarred, weather-beaten face ; and as he settled 
himself against a rock with the deliberate intention of 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



a chat, I commenced by asking after the landlord oi 
those parts, well known and honoured both by sports- 
man and by farmer. 

' He was gone to Malta — a warmer place that than 
Exmoor.' 

'What! have you been in Malta?' 

Yes, he had been in Malta, and in stranger places 
yet. He had been a sailor: he had seen the landing 
in Egypt, and heard the French cannon thundering 
vainly from the sand-hills on the English boats. He 
had himself helped to lift Abercrombie up the ship's 
side to the death-bed of the brave. He had seen 
Caraccioli hanging at his own yard-arm, and heard 
(so he said, I know not how correctly) Lady Hamilton 
order out the barge herself, and row round the frigate 
of the murdered man, to glut her eyes with her re- 
venge. He had seen, too, the ghastly corpse float- 
ing upright, when Nelson and the enchantress met 
their victim, returned from the sea-depths to stare at 
them, as Banquo's ghost upon' Macbeth. But she was 
'a mortal fine woman, was Lady Hamilton, though 
she ^vas a queer one, and cruel kind to the sailors; 
and many a man she saved from flogging; and one 
from hanging, too ; that was a marine that got a- 
stealing; for Nelson, though he was kind enough, yet 
it was a word and a blow with him ; and quite right 
he, sir; for there be such rascals on board ship, that if 



NORTH DEVON. 239 

you arn't as sharp with them as with wild beastesses, 
no man's life, nor the ship's neither, would be worth a 
day's purchase.' 

So he, with his simple straightforward notions of 
right and wrong, worth much maudlin unmerciful 
indulgence which we hear in these days : and yet not 
going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall 
see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me 
how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to 
marry a wife and get tall sons, and lay his bones in 
his native village ; till which time (for death to the 
aged poor man is a Sabbath, of which he talks freely, 
calmly, even joyously) 'he just got his bread, by the 
squire's kindness, patching and mending at the stone 
deer-fences.' 

I gave him something to buy tobacco, and watched 
him as he crawled away, with a sort of stunned sur- 
prise. And he had actually seen Nelson sit by Lady 
Hamilton ! It was so strange, to have that gay Italian 
bay, with all its memories, — the orgies of Baise, and 
the unburied wrecks of ancient towns, with the smoking 
crater far above; and the world-famous Nile-mouths, 
and those great old wars, big with the destinies of the 
world ; and those great old heroes, with their awful 
deeds for good and evil, all brought so suddenly and 
livingly before me, up there in the desolate moorland, 
where the deer, and birds, and heath, and rushes were 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



even as they had been from the beginning. Like 
"Wordsworth with his Leech-Gatherer (a poem which 
I, in spite of laughter, must rank among his very 
highest), — 

' While he was talking thus, the lonely place, 
The old man's shape, and speech — all troubled me : 
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace 
About the weary moors continually, 
"Wandering about alone aud silently. 

and when he ended, 

I could have laughed myself to scorn to find 
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.' 

Just then I heard a rustle, and turning, saw Claude 
toiling down to me over the hill-side. He joined me, 
footsore and weary, but in great excitement ; for the first 
minute or two he could not speak, and at last, — 

' Oh, I have seen such a sight ! — but I will tell you 
how it all was. After I left you I met a keeper. He 
spoke civilly to me — you know my antipathy to game 
and those who live thereby : but there was a wild, bold, 
self-helping look about him and his gun alone there 
in the waste — and after all he was a man and a brother. 
Well, we fell into talk, and fraternized ; and at last he 
offered to take me to a neighbouring hill and show me 
"sixty head of red-deer all together;" and as he spoke 
he looked quite proud of his words. " I was lucky," he 
said, " to come just then, for the stags had all just got 
their heads again." At which speech I wondered ; but 



XOIITII DEVON. 241 



was silent, and followed him, I, Claude the Cockney, 
such a walk as I shall never take again. Behold these 
trousers — behold these hands ! scratched to pieces by 
crawling on all-fours through the heather. Bat I saw 
them.' 

' A sight worth many pairs of plaid trousers ? ' 
'Worth Saint Chrysostom's seven years' nakedness 
on all-fours ! And so I told the fellow, who by some 
cunning calculations about wind, and sun, and so forth, 
which he imparted to my uncomprehending ears, 
brought me suddenly to the top of a little crag, below 
which, some hundred yards off, the whole herd stood, 
stags, hinds — but I can't describe them. I have not 
brought away a scrap of sketch, though we watched them 
full ten minutes undiscovered ; and then the stare, and 
the toss of those antlers, and the rush ! That broke the 
spell with me ; for I had been staring stupidly at them, 
trying in vain to take in the sight, with the strangest 
new excitement heaving and boiling up in my throat ; 
and at the sound of their hoofs on the turf I woke, 
and found the keeper staring, not at them, but at me, 
who, I verily believe, had something very like a tear in 
these excitable eyes of mine.' 

'" Arn't you well, sir ? " said he. "You needn't be 
afeard; it's only at the fall of the year the stags is 
wicked." 

' I don't know what I answered at first ; but the 
K K 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



fellow understood me when I shook his hand frantically, 
and told him that I should thank him to the last day 
of my life, and that I would not have missed it for a 
thousand pounds. In part-proof whereof I gave him a 
sovereign on the spot, which seemed to clear my cha- 
racter in his eyes as much as the crying at the sight 
of a herd of deer had mystified it.' 

' Claude, well-beloved,' said I, ' will you ever speak 
contemptuously of sportsmen any more ? ' 

' " Do manus," I have been vilifying them, as one does 
most things in the world, only for want of understand- 
ing them. How shall I do penance ? Go and take 
service with Edwin Landseer, as pupil, colour-grinder, 
footboy ? ' 

' You will then be very near to a very great poet,' 
quoth I, ' and one whose w T orks will become, as cen- 
turies roll on, more and more valuable to art and 
to science, and, possibly, to something higher than 
either; 

' I begin to guess your meaning,' answered Claude. 

' So we lounged, and dreamt, and fished, in heathery 
Highland,' as Mr. Clough would say, while the summer 
snipes flitted whistling up the shallow before us, and 
the soft, south-eastern clouds slid lazily across the sun, 
and the little trout snapped and dimpled at a tiny par- 
tridge hackle, with a twist of orange silk, whose elegance 
of shape and colour reconciled Claude's heart some- 



KOBTH DEVON. 243 



•what to my everlasting whipping of the water. When 
at last : — 

' You seem to have given up catching anything. You 
have not stirred a fish in this last two pools, except 
that little saucy yellow shrimp, who jumped over your 
fly, and gave a spiteful slap at it with his tail.' 

Too true ; and what could he the cause ? Had 
that impudent sand-piper frightened all the fish on his 
way up ? Had an otter paralysed them with terror for 
the morning? Or had a stag been, down to drink? 
"We saw the fresh slot of his broad claws, by the bye, 
in the mud a few yards back. 

' We must have seen the stag himself, if he had been 
here lately,' said Claude. 

' Mr. Landseer knows too well by this time that that 
is a non sequitur.' 

' " I am no more a non sequitur than 3^ou are," an- 
swered the Cornish magistrate to the barrister.' 

'Fish and deer, friend, see us purblind sons of 
men somewhat more quickly than we see them, fear 
sharpening the senses. Perhaps, after all, the fault is 
in your staring white-straw hat, a garment which has 
spoilt many a good day's fishing. Ah, no ! there is the 
cause ; the hat of a mightier than you — the thunder- 
spirit himself. Thor is at hand, while the breeze, awe- 
stricken, falls dead calm before his march. Behold, 
climbing above that eastern ridge, his huge powdered 

K 2 



244 PBOSE IDYLLS. 



cauliflower-wig, barred with a grey horizontal handker- 
chief of mist.' 

' Oh, profane and uncomely simile ! — which will next, 
I presume, liken the coming hailstorm to hair-powder 
shaken from the said wig.' 

'To shot rather than to powder. Flee, oh, flee to 
yonder pile of crags, and thank your stars that there is 
one at hand ; for these mountain tornadoes are at once 
Tropic in their ferocity and Siberian in their cutting 
cold.' 

Dowd it came. The brown hills vanished in white 
sheets of hail, first falling perpendicularly, then slanting 
and driving furiously before the cold blast which issued 
from the storm. The rock above us rang with the 
thunder-peals ; and the lightning, which might have 
fallen miles away, seemed to our dazzled eyes to dive 
into the glittering river at our feet. We sat silent 
some half-hour, listening to the voice of One more 
mighty than ourselves ; and it was long after the up- 
roar had rolled away among the hills, and a steady, 
sighing sheet of warmer rains, from banks of low grey 
fog, had succeeded the rattling of the hail upon the 
crisp heather, that I turned to Claude. 

' And now, since your heart is softened towards these 
wild, stag-hunting, trout-fishing, jovial west-country- 
men, consider whether it should not be softened like- 
wise toward those old outlaw ballads which I have 



NORTH DEVON. 



never yet been able to make you admire. They express 
feelings not yet extinct in the minds of a large portion 
of the lower orders, as yon would know had you lived, 
like me, all your life in poaching counties, and on the 
edges of one forest after another, — feelings which must 
be satisfied, even in the highest development of the 
civilization of the future, for they are innate in every 
thoughtful and energetic race, — feelings which, though 
they have often led to crime, have far oftener delivered 
from swinish sensuality ; the feelings which drove into 
the merry greenwood "Kobin Hood, Scarlet, and John;" 
"Adam Bell, and Clym of the Cleugh, and William of 
Cloudislee ; " the feelings which prompted one half of 
his inspiration to the nameless immortal who wrote the 
"ISTutbrown Maid;" — feelings which could not then, 
and cannot now, be satisfied by the drudgery of a 
barbaric agriculture, which, without science, economy, 
or enterprise, offers no food for the highest instincts 
of the human mind, its yearnings after Nature, after 
freedom, and the noble excitement of self-dependent 
energy.' 

Our talk ended : but the rain did not : and we were 
at last fain to leave our shelter, and let ourselves 
be blown by the gale (the difficulty being not to pro- 
gress forward, but to keep our feet) back to the shed 
where our ponies were tied, and to canter home to Lyn- 
mouth, with the rain cutting our faces like showers of 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



pebbles, and our little mountain ponies staggering 
against the wind, and more than once, if Londoners 
will believe me, blown sheer up against the bank 
by some mad gust, which rushed perpendicularly, not 
down, but up, the chasms of the glens below. 



II. — The Coast Line. 

It is four o'clock on a May morning, and Claude 
and I are just embarking' on board a Clovelly trawling 
skiff, which, having disposed of her fish at various 
ports along the Channel, is about to run leisurely 
homewards with an ebb tide, and a soft north-easterly 
breeze. 

So farewell, fair Lynmouth ; and ye storm-spirits, 
send us a propitious day ; and dismiss those fantastic 
clouds which are coquetting with your thrones, crawl- 
ing down one hillside, and whirling and leaping up 
another, in wreaths of snow, and dun, and amber, 
pierced every minute by some long glittering upward 
arrow from the rising sun, which gilds grey crags 
and downs a thousand feet above, while underneath 
the gorges still sleep black and cold in shade. 

There, they have heard us ! The cap rises off the 
' Summer-house hill,' that eight hundred feet of upright 
•wall, which seems ready to topple down into the nest of 



NOB Til DEVON. 



be-myrtled cottages at its foot ; and as we sweep out 
into the deeper water the last mist-flake streams up 
from the Foreland, and vanishes in white threads into 
the stainless blue. 

' Look at the colours of that Foreland ! ' cried 
Claude. ' The simple monotone of pearly green, 
broken only at intervals by blood-red stains, where the 
turf has slipped and left the fresh rock bare, and all 
glimmering softly through a delicate blue haze, like the 
bloom on a half-ripened plum !' 

' And look, too, how the grey pebble beach is already 
dancing and quivering in the mirage which steams up, 
like the hot breath of a limekiln, from the drying 
stones. Talk of " glazings and scumblings," ye artists ! 
and bungle at them as you will, what are they to 
Nature's own glazings, deepening every instant there 
behind us 1 ' 

' Mock me not. I have walked up and down here 
with a humbled and broken spirit, and had nearly 
forsworn the audacity of painting anything beyond a 
beech stem, or a frond of fern.' 

' The little infinite in them would have baffled you 
just as much as the only somewhat bigger infinite of 
the hills on which they grow.' 

' Confest : and so farewell to unpaintable Lynmouth ! 
Farewell to the charming contrast of civilized English 
landscape-gardening, with its villas, and its exotics, 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



and its evergreens, thus strangely and yet harmo- 
niously confronted with, the chaos of the rocks 
and mountain-streams. Those grounds of Sir William 

H- 's are a double paradise, the wild Eden of the 

Past side by side with the cultivated Eden of the 
Future. How its alternations of Art and Savagery at 
once startle and relieve the sense, as you pass sud- 
denly out of wildernesses of piled boulders, and tor- 
rent-shattered trees, and the roar of fern-fringed 
waterfalls, into " trim walks, and fragrant alleys green ; " 
and the door of a summer-house transports you 
at a step from Eichmond to the Alps. Happy he who 
" possesses," as the world calls it, and happier still he 
whose taste could organize, that fairy bower.' 

So he, magnilocp:iently, as was his wont ; and yet his 
declamations always flowed with such a graceful ease, — 
a simple, smiling earnestness, — an unpractised melody 
of voice, that what would have been rant from other 
lips, from his showed only as the healthy enthusiasm 
of the passionate, all-seeing, all-loving artist. 

'Look yonder, again,' said he, gazing up at the 
huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us. ' One wonders 
at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not 
true after all, — and that " Vale of Bocks," hanging five 
hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and totter- 
ing battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great 
blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, be not 



NORTH DEVON. 



some enormous Cyclopean temple left half-disinterred : 
or is it a fragment of old Chaos, left unorganized 1 — 
or, perhaps, the waste heap of the world, where, after 
the rest of England had been made, some angel put 
up a notice for his fellows, " Dry rubbish shot here " ? ' 

' Not so, unscientific ! It is the grandfather of hills, 
— a fossil bone of some old continent, which stood here 
ages before England was. And the great earth- angel, 
who grinds up mountains into paint, as you do bits of 
ochre, for his " Continental Sketches," found in it the 
materials for a whole dark ground-tone of coal-measures, 
and a few hundred miles of warm high-lights, which 
we call New Eed Sandstone.' 

What a sea-wall they are, those Exmoor hills ! 
Sheer upward from the sea a thousand feet rise the 
downs ; and as we slide and stagger lazily along 
before the dying breeze, through the deep water which 
never leaves the cliff, the eye ranges, almost dizzy, 
up some five hundred feet of rock, dappled with every 
hue; from the intense dark of the tide-line, through 
the warm green and brown rock-shadows, out of which 
the horizontal cracks of the strata loom black, and the 
breeding gulls show like lingering snow-flakes; up to 
the middle cliff, where delicate grey fades into pink, 
pink into red, red into glowing purple ; up to where 
the purple is streaked with glossy ivy wreaths, and 
black-green yews ; up to where all the choir of colours 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



vanishes abruptly on the mid-hill, to give place to one 
yellowish-grey sheet of upward down, sweeping aloft 
smooth and unbroken, except by a lonely stone, or 
knot of clambering sheep, and stopped by one great 
rounded waving line, sharp-cut against the brilliant 
blue. The sheep hang like white daisies upon the 
steep ; and a solitary falcon rides, a speck in air, yet 
far below the crest of that tall hill. Now he sinks to 
the cliff edge, and hangs quivering, supported, like a 
kite, by the pressure of his breast and long curved 
wings, against the breeze. 

There he hangs, the peregrine — a true ' falcon gentle/ 
'sharp-notched, long-taloned, crooked-winged,' whose 
uncles and cousins, ages since, have struck at duck 
and pheasant, and sat upon the wrists of ldngs. And 
now he is full proud of any mouse or cliff-lark; 
like an old Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans, he 
lingers round ' the hunting-field of his fathers.' So 
all things end. 

' The old order changeth, giving place to the new ; 
And God fulfils Himself in many ways, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' 

' Ay, and the day may come,' said Claude, ' when 
the brows of that huge High Yere shall be crowned 
with golden wheat, and every rock-ledge on Trentishoe, 
like those of Petra and the Ehine, support its garden- 
bed of artificial soil.' 



NORTH DEVON. 



' And when/ I answered, ' the shingly sides of that 
great chasm of Headon's Mouth may be clothed with 
the white mulberry, and the summer limestone-skiffs 
shall go back freighted with fabrics which vie with the 
finest woof of Italy and Lyons.' 

'You believe, then, in the late Mrs. "Whitby of 
Lymington 1 ' 

' Seeing is believing, Claude : through laughter, and 
failures, and the stupidity of half-barbarous clods, she 
persevered in her silk-growing, and succeeded; and I 
should like to put her book into the hands of every 
squire in Devon, Cornwall, and the South of Ireland.' 

' Or require them to pass an examination in it, as 
one more among the many books which I intend, in 
my ideal kingdom, all landlords to read and digest, 
before they are allowed to take possession of their 
estates. In the meantime, what is that noble conical 
hill, which has increased my wonder at the infinite 
variety of beauty which The Spirit can produce by 
combinations so simple as a few grey stones and a 
sheet of turf? ' 

' The Hangman.' 

' An ominous name. What is its history ? ' 

' Some sheep-stealer, they say, clambering over a 
wall with his booty slung round his neck, was literally 
hung by the poor brute's struggles, and found days after 
on the mountain-side, a blackened corpse on one side 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



of the wall, with the sheep on the other, and the 
ravens You may fill up the picture for yourself.' 

But, see, as we round the Hangman, what a change 
of scene — the square - blocked sandstone cliffs dip 
suddenly under dark slate-beds, fantastically bent 
and broken by primeval earthquakes. Wooded combes, 
and craggy ridges of rich pasture-land, wander and 
slope towards a labyrinth of bush-fringed coves, black 
isolated tide-rocks, and land-locked harbours. There 
shines among the woods the Castle of Watermouth, on 
its lovely little salt-water loch, the safest harbour on 
the coast ; and there is Conibe-Martin, mile-long man- 
stye, which seven centuries of fruitless silver-mining, 
and of the right (now deservedly lost) of 'sending a 
talker to the national palaver,' have neither cleansed 
nor civilized. Turn, turn thy head away, dear Claude, 
lest even at this distance some foul odour taint the 
summer airs, and complete the misfortune already 
presaged by that pale, sad face, sickening in the burn- 
ing calm ! For this great sun-roasted fire-brick of the 
Exmoor range is fairly burning up the breeze, and 
we have nothing but the tide to drift us slowly down 
to Ilfracombe. 

Now we open Eillage, and now Hillsborough, two 
of the most picturesque of headlands ; see how their 
round foreheads of glistening grey shale sink down 
into two dark, jagged moles, running far out to sea- 



NORTE DEVON. 253 



ward, and tapering off, each into a long black hori- 
zontal line, vanishing at last beneath its lace-fringe 
of restless hissing foam. How grand the contrast of 
the lightness of those sea-lines, with the solid mass 
which rests upon them ! Look, too, at the glaring 
lights and Tartarean shadows of those chasms and 
caves, which the . tide never leaves, or the foot of 
man explores; and listen how, at every rush of the 
long ground-swell, mysterious mutterings, solemn sighs, 
sudden thunders, as of a pent-up earthquake, boom 
out of them across the glassy swell. Look at those 
blasts of delicate vapour that shoot up from hidden 
rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish ; and those 
green columns of wave which rush mast-high up the 
perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outward 
in a waterfall of foam, lacing the black rocks with a 
thousand snowy streams. There they fall, and leap, 
and fall again. And so they did yesterday, and the 
day before; and so they did centuries ago, when the 
Danes swept past them, battleworn, and sad of heart 
for the loss of the magic raven flag, from the fight 
at Appledore, to sit down and starve on c the island of 
Bradanrelice, which men call Flat Holms.' Ay, and 
even so they leapt and fell, before a sail gleamed on the 
Severn sea, when the shark and the ichthyosaur paddled 
beneath the shade of tropic forests — now scanty turf 
and golden gorse. And so they will leap and fall on, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



on, through the centuries and the ages. dim abyss 
of Time, into which we peer shuddering, what will be 
the end of thee, and of this ceaseless coil and moan of 
waters ? It is true, that when thou shalt be no more, 
then, too, ' there shall be no more sea ; ' and this ocean 
bed, this great grave of fertility, into which all earth's 
wasted riches stream, day and night, from hill and 
town, shall rise and become fruitful soil, corn-field and 
meadow-land ; and earth shall teem as thick with living 
men as bean-fields with the summer bees ? What a 
consummation ! At least there is One greater than 
sea, or time : and the Judge of all the earth will do 
right. 

But there is Ilfracombe, with its rock-walled har- 
bour, its little wood of masts within, its white terraces, 
rambling up the hills, and its capstone sea-walk, the 
finest ' marine parade,' as Cockneydom terms it, in all 
England, except that splendid Hoe at Plymouth, ' Lam 
Goemagot,' Gog-magog's leap, as the old Britains called 
it, over which Corineus threw that mighty giant. And 
there is the little isolated rock-chapel, where seven 
hundred years ago, our west-country forefathers used 
to go to pray St. Nicholas for deliverance from ship- 
wreck, — a method lovingly regretted by some, as a 
' pious idea of the Ages of faith.' "We, however, shall 
prefer the present method of lighthouses and the worthy- 
Trinity Board, as actually more godly and ' faithful/ as 



NORTH DEVON. 



well as more useful ; and, probably, so do the sailors 
themselves. 

But Claude is by this time nearly sick of the roast- 
ing calm, and the rolling ground-swell, and the smell 
of fish, and is somewhat sleepy also, between early 
rising and incoherent sermons ; wherefore, if he takes 
good advice, he will stay and recruit himself at Ilfra- 
combe, before he proceeds further with his self-elected 
cicerone on the grand tour of North Devon. Believe 
me, Claude, you will not stir from the place for a month 
at least. For be sure, if you are sea-sick, or heart-sick, 
or pocket-sick either, there is no pleasanter or cheaper 
place of cure (to indulge in a puff of a species now 
well nigh obsolete, the puff honest and true) than this 
same Ilfracombe, with its quiet nature and its quiet 
luxury, its rock fairy-land and its sea-walks, its downs 
and combes, its kind people, and, if possible, its still 
kinder climate, which combines the soft warmth of 
South Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh 
mountains ; where winter has slipped out of the list 
of the seasons, and mother Earth makes up for her 
summer's luxury by fasting, ' not in sackcloth and ashes, 
but in new silk and old sack ; ' and instead of standing 
three months chin-deep in ice, and christening great 
snowballs her 'friends and family,' as St. Francis of 
Assisi did of old, knows no severer asceticism than 
tepid shower-baths, and a parasol of soft grey mist. 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



III. — MORTE. 

I liad been wandering over the centre of Exmoor, 
killing trout as I went, through a country which owes 
its civilization and tillage to the spirit of one man, 
who has found stag-preserving by no means incom- 
patible with large agricultural improvements; among 
a population who still evince an unpleasant partiality 
for cutting and carrying farmers' crops by night, with- 
out leave or licence, and for housebreaking after the 
true classic method of Athens, by fairly digging holes 
through the house walls ; a little nook of primeval 
savagery fast reorganizing itself under the influences 
of these better days. I had been on Dartmoor, too ; 
but of that noble moorland range so much has been 
said and sung of late, that I really am afraid it is 
becoming somewhat cockney and trite. Far and wide 
I had wandered, rod in hand, becoming a boy again in 
the land of my boyhood, till, once more at Ilfracombe, 
opposite me sat Claude Mellot, just beginning to bloom 
again into cheerfulness. 

We were on the point of starting for Morte, and so 
round to Saunton Court, and the sands beyond it ; where 
a Clovelly trawler, which we had chartered for the occa- 
sion, had promised to send a boat on shore and take us 
off, provided the wind lay off the land. 

But, indeed, the sea was calm as glass, the sky 



NORTH DEToX. 257 

cloudless azure ; and the doubt; was not whether we 
should he able to get on hoard through the surf, but 
whether, having got on board, we should not lie till 
nightfall, as idle 

' As a painted ship, 
Upon a painted ocean. ' 

And now behold us on our way up lovely combes, 
with their green copses, ridges of rock, golden furze, 
fruit-laden orchards, and slopes of emerald pasture, 
pitched as steep as house-roofs, where the red long- 
horns are feeding, with their tails a yard above their 
heads ; and under us, seen in bird's-eye view, the 
ground-plans of the little snug farms and homesteads 
of the Damnonii, ' dwellers in the valley,' as we West- 
countrymen were called of old. JSTow we are leaving 
them far below us ; the blue hazy sea is showing fai 
above the serrated ridge of the Tors, and their huge 
bank of sunny green : and before us is a desolate table- 
land of rushy pastures and mouldering banks, festooned 
with the delicate network of the little ivy-leaved cam- 
panula, loveliest of British wild-flowers, fit with its 
hair-like stems and tiny bells of blue to wreathe the 
temples of Titania. Alas ! we have passed out of the 
world into limbum patrum, and the region of ineffec- 
tuality and incompleteness. The only cultivators here, 
and through thousands of acres in the North of Devon, 
are the rook and mole : and yet the land is rich enough 
K 8 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



— the fat deep crumbling of the shale and ironstone 
returning year by year into the mud, from whence it 
hardened ages since. There are scores of farms of far 
worse land in mid-England, under ' a four-course shift/ 
yielding their load of wheat an acre. When will that 
land do as much ? When will the spirit of Smith of 
Deanston and Grey of Dilston descend on North 
"Devon ? When will some true captain of industry, 
and Theseus of the nineteenth century, like the late 
Mr. Warnes of Trimmingham, teach the people here 
to annihilate poor-rates by growing flax upon some 
of the finest flax land, and in the finest flax climate, 
that we have in England? The shrewd Cornishmen 
of Launceston and Bodmin have awakened long ago 
to 'the new gospel of fertility.' When will North 
Devon awake? 

'When landlords and farmers,' said Claude, 'at last 
acknowledge their divine vocation, and feel it a noble 
and heaven-ordained duty to produce food for the 
people of England ; when they learn that to grow rushes 
where they might grow corn, ay, to grow four quarters 
of wheat where they might grow five, is to sin against 
God's blessings and against the English nation. No 
wonder that sluggards like these cry out for protection 
that those who cannot take care of the land feel that 
they themselves need artificial care.' 

'We will not talk politics, Claude. Our modern 






NORTH DEVON. 259 



expediency mongers have made them pro tempore an 
extinct science. " Let the dead bury their dead." The 
social questions are now-a-days becoming far more im- 
portant than the mere House of Commons ones.' 

'There does seem here and there/ he said, 'some 
sign of improvement. I see the paring plough at work 
on one field and another.' 

' Swiftly goes the age, and slowly crawls improve- 
ment. The greater part of that land will be only 
broken up to be exhausted by corn-crop after corn-crop, 
till it can bear no more, and the very manure which is 
drawn home from it in the shape of a few turnips will 
be wasted by every rain of heaven, and the straw pro- 
bably used to mend bad places in the road with ; while 
the land returns to twenty years of worse sterility than 
ever ; on the ground that — 

' " Yeather did zo, and gramfer did zo, and why 
shouldn't Jan do the zame V" * * * * 

'But here is Morte below us. "The little grey 
church on the windy shore," which once belonged 'to 
William de Tracy, one of your friend Thomas a 
Becket's murderers. If you wish to vent your wrath 
against those who cut off your favourite Saxon hero, 
there is a tomb in the church which bears De Tracy's 
name ; over which rival Dryasdusts contend fiercely 
with paper-arrows : the one party assertiDg that he 
became a priest, and died- here in the wilderness ; the 

s 2 



FjROSLJ idylls. 



others that the tomb is of later date, that he fled hence 
to Italy, under favour of a certain easy-going Bishop of* 
Exeter, and died penitent and duly shriven, according 
to the attestations of a certain or uncertain Bishop of 
Cosenza.' 

' Peace he with him and with the Bishop ! The 
flight to Italy seems a very needless precaution to a 
man who owned this corner of the world. A bailiff 
would have had even less chance here then than in 
Connemara a hundred years ago.' 

' He certainly would have fed the crabs and rock- 
cod in two hours after his arrival. Nevertheless, I 
believe the Cosenza story is the safer one.' 

' What a chaos of rock-ridges ! — Old starved mother 
Earth's bare-worn ribs and joints peeping out through 
every field and down ; and on three sides of us, the 
sullen thunder of the unseen surge. What a place 
for some "gloom-pampered man" to sit and misan- 
thropize ! ' 

' " Morte," says the Devonshire proverb, " is the place 
on earth which heaven made last, and the devil will 
take first." ' 

'All the fitter for a misanthrope. But where are 
the trees ? I have not seen one for the last four 
miles.' 

'Nor will you for a few miles more. Whatever 
will grow here (and most things will) they will not, 



NORTH DEVON. 



except, at least, hereafter the sea-pine of the Biscay 
shore. You would know why, if you had ever felt a 
south-westerly gale here, when the foam-flakes are 
flying miles inland, and you are fain to cling breath- 
less to bank and bush, if you want to get one look at 
those black fields of shark's-tooth tide-rocks, champing 
and churning the great green rollers into snow. Wild 
folk are these here, gatherers of shell-fish and laver, 
and merciless to wrecked vessels, which they consider 
as their own by immemorial usage, or rather right 
divine. Significant, how an agricultural people is 
generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one 
is merciful. I could tell you twenty stories of the 
baysmen clown there to the westward risking them- 
selves like very heroes to save strangers' lives, and 
beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for 
plunder from the inland hills.' 

'Knowledge, you see, breeds sympathy and love. 
But what a merciless coast ! ' 

'Hardly a winter passes without a wreck or two. 
You see there lying about the timbers of more than 
one tall ship. You see, too, that black rock a-wash 
far out at sea, apparently a submarine outlier of the 
north horn of this wide rock-amphitheatre below us. 
That is the Morte stone, the "Death-rock," as the 
Normans christened it of old; and it does not belie 
its name even now. See how, even in this calm, it 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



hurls up its column of spray at every wave ; and then 
conceive being entrapped between it and the cliffs, on 
some blinding, whirling winter's night, when the land 
is shrouded thick in clouds, and the roar of the 
breakers hardly precedes by a minute the crash of 
your bows against the rocks.' 

'I never think, on principle, of things so painful, 
and yet so irrelievable. Yet why does not your much- 
admired Trinity House erect a light there ? ' 

' So ask the sailors ; for it is indeed one of the gate- 
way-jambs of the Channel, and the deep water and the 
line of coast tempt all craft to pass as close to it as 
possible.' 

'Look at that sheet of yellow sand below us now, 
banked to the inland with sand-hills and sunny 
downs, and ending abruptly at the foot of that sombre 
wall of slate-hill, which runs out like a huge pier into 
the sea some two miles off.' 

' That is Woollacombe : but here on our right is a 
sight worth seeing. Every gully and creek there 
among the rocks is yellow, but not with sand. Those 
are shells; the sweepings of the ocean bed for miles 
around, piled there, millions upon millions, yards deep, 
in every stage of destruction. There they lie grinding 
to dust ; and every gale brings in fresh myriads from 
the inexhaustible sea-world, as if Death could be never 
tired of devouring, or God of making. The brain 



NORTH DEVON. 



grows dizzy and tired, as one's feet crunch over the 
endless variety of their forms.' 

'And then one recollects that every one of them 
has "been a living thing — a whole history of hirth, and 
growth, and propagation, and death. Waste it cannot 
be, or cruelty on the part of the Maker: but why 
this infinite development of life, apparently only to 
furnish out of it now and then a cartload of shell- 
sand to these lazy farmers ? But after all, there is 
not so much life in all those shells put together as 
in one little child: and it may die the hour that it 
is born ! What we call life is but an appearance and 
a becoming ; the true life of existence belongs only 
to spirits. And whether or not we, or the sea-shell 
there, are at any given moment helping to make up 
part of some pretty little pattern in this great kaleido- 
scope called the material universe, yet, in the spirit 
all live to Him, and shall do so for ever.' 

And thereon he rambled off into a long lecture 
on 'species-spirits,' and 'individual-spirits,' and 'per- 
sonal spirits/ doubtless most important. But I, what 
between the sun, the luncheon, and the metaphysic, 
sank into soft slumbers, from which I was only 
awakened by the carriage stopping, according to our 
order, on the top of Saunton hill. 

We left the fly, and wandered down towards the old 
gabled court, nestling amid huge walnuts in its south- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



ward glen ; while before us spread a panorama, half 
sea, half land, than which, perhaps, our England owns 
few lovelier. 

At our feet was a sea of sand — for the half-mile to 
the right smooth as a floor, bounded by a broad band 
of curling waves, which crept slowly shorewards with 
the advancing tide. Eight underneath us the sand 
was drifted for miles into fantastic hills, which quivered 
in the heat, the glaring yellow of its lights chequered 
by delicate pink shadows and sheets of grey-green bent. 
To the left were rich alluvial marshes, covered with red 
cattle sleeping in the sun, and laced with creeks and 
flowery dykes ; and here and there a scarlet line, which 
gladdened Claude's eye as being a 'bit of positive 
colour in the foreground,' and mine, because they were 
draining tiles. Beyond again, two broad tide-rivers, 
spotted with white and red-brown sails, gleamed like 
avenues of silver, past knots of gay dwellings, and tall 
lighthouses, and church-towers, and wandered each on 
its own road, till they vanished among the wooded 
hills. On the eastern horizon the dark range of Exmoor 
sank gradually into lower and more broken ridges, 
which rolled away, woodland beyond woodland, till 
all outlines were lost in purple haze; while, far 
beyond, the granite peaks of Dartmoor hung like a 
delicate blue cloud, and enticed the eye away into 
infinity. From hence, as our eyes swept round the 



XORTII DEVON. 



horizon, the broken hills above the river's mouth 
gradually rose into the table-land of the ' barren coal- 
measures ' some ten miles off, — a long straight wall of 
cliffs which bounded the broad bay, buried in deepest 
shadow, except where the opening of some glen re- 
vealed far depths of sunlit wood. A faint perpendicular 
line of white houses, midway along the range, marked 
our destination; and far to the westward, the land 
ended sheer and suddenly at the cliffs of Hartland, the 
' Promontory of Hercules/ as the old Eomans called it, 
to reappear some ten miles out in the Atlantic, in the 
blue flat-topped island of Lundy, so exactly similar in 
height and form to the opposite cape, that it required 
no scientific imagination to supply the vast gap which 
the primaeval currents had sawn out. There it all lay 
beneath us like a map ; its thousand hues toned down 
harmoniously into each other by the summer haze, and 
' the eye was not filled with seeing,' nor the spirit with 
the intoxicating sight of infinitely various life and form 
in perfectest repose. 

I was the first to break the silence. 

' Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little ? ' 

No answer. 

'Not even rhapsodize? call it "lovely, exquisite, 
grand, majestic"? There are plenty of such words in 
worldlings' mouths — not a Cockney but would burst 
out with some enthusiastic commonplace at such a 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



sight— surely one or other of them must be appro- 
priate.' 

' Silence, profane ! and take me away from this. 
Let us go down, and hide our stupidities among those 
sand-hills, and so forget the whole. What use standing 
here to be maddened by this tantalizing earth-spirit, 
who shows us such glorious things, and will not tell us 
what they mean ? ' 

So down we went upon the burrows, among the 
sands, which hid from us every object but their own 
chaotic curves and mounds. Above, a hundred sky- 
larks made the air ring with carollings ; strange and 
gaudy plants flecked the waste round us ; and insects 
without number whirred over our heads, or hung 
poised with their wings outspread on the tall stalks of 
marram grass. All at once a cloud hid the sun, and 
a summer whirlwind, presage of the thunderstorm, 
swept past us, carrying up with it a column of dry 
sand, and rattling the dry bents over our heads. 

' What a chill, doleful sigh comes from those reeds ! ' 
said Claude. 'I can conceive this desert, beneath a 
driving winter's sky instead of this burning azure, one 
of the most desolate places on the earth.' 

'Ay, desolate enough,' I said, as we walked down 
beyond the tide-mark, over the vast fields of ribbed 
and splashy sands, 'when the dead shells are rolling 
and crawling up the beach in wreaths before the gale, 



NORTH DEVON. 



with a ghastly rattle as of the dry bones in the " Valley 
of Vision," and when not a flower shows on that sand- 
cliff, which is now one broad bed of yellow, scarlet, and 
azure.' 

' That is the first spot in England,' said Claude, 
' except, of course, " the meads of golden king-cups," 
where I have seen wild flowers give a tone to the 
colouring of the whole landscape, as they are said to do 
in the prairies of Texas. And look how flowers 
and cliff are both glowing in a warm green haze, like 
that of Cuyp's wonderful sandcliff picture in the Dul- 
wich Gallery, — wonderful, as I think, and true, let 
some critics revile it as much as they will.' 

* Strange, that you should have quoted that picture 
here ; its curious resemblance to this very place first 
awoke in me, years ago, a living interest in landscape- 
painting. But look there ; even in these grand summer 
days there is a sight before us sad enough. There are 
the ribs of some ill-fated ship, a man-of-war too, as 
the story goes, standing like black fangs, half-buried 
in the sand. And off what are those two ravens 
rising, stirring up with their obscene wings a sickly, 
putrescent odour ? A corpse ? ' 

No, it was not a corpse ; but the token of many 
corpses. A fragment of some ship; its gay green 
paint and half-effaced gilding contrasting mockingly 
with the long ugly feathered barnacle-shells, which 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



clustered on it, rotting into slime beneath the sun, 
and torn and scattered by the greedy beaks of the 
ravens. 

In what tropic tornado, or on what coral-key of 
the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, 
had that tall ship gone down ? How long had that 
scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, 
from Newfoundland into the Mid- Atlantic, and hither- 
ward on its homeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen 
shore? And who were all those living men who 
" went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of 
heroes," to give no sign until the sea shall render 
up her dead ? And every one of them had a father 
and mother — a wife, perhaps, and children, waiting 
for him — at least a whole human life, childhood, 
boyhood, manhood, in him. All those years of toil 
and education, to get him so far on his life-voyage ; 
and here is the end thereof ! ' 

' Say rather, the beginning thereof,' Claude answered, 
stepping into the boat. ' This wreck is but a torn scrap 
of the chrysalis-cocoon ; we may meet the butterflies 
themselves hereafter.' 

***** 

And now we are on board ; and alas ! some time 
before the breeze will be so. Take care of that huge 
boom, landsman Claude, swaying and sweeping back- 
wards and forwards across the deck, unless you wish to 



NORTH DEVON. 269 



be knocked overboard. Take care, too, of that loose 
rope's end, unless you wish to have your eyes cut out. 
Take my advice, lie down here across the deck, as 
others are doing. Cover yourself with great-coats, like 
an Irishman, to keep yourself cool, and let us meditate 
a little on this strange thing, and strange place, which 
holds us now. 

Look at those spars, how they creak and groan 
with every heave of the long glassy swell. How those 
sails flap, and thunder, and rage, with useless outcries 
and struggles — only because they are idle. Let the 
wind take them, and they will be steady, silent in 
an instant — their deafening dissonant grumbling ex- 
changed for the soft victorious song of the breeze 
through the rigging, musical, self-contented, as of 
bird on bough. So it is through life ; there is no 
true rest but labour. "No true misery," as Carlyle 
says, " but in that of not being able to work." Some 
may call it a pretty conceit. I call it a great world- 
wide law, which reaches from earth to heaven. What- 
ever the Preacher may have thought it in a moment of 
despondency, what is it but a blessing that " sun, and 
wind, and rivers, and ocean," as he says, and "all 
things, are full of labour — man cannot utter it." This 
sea which bears us would rot and poison, did it not 
sweep in and out here twice a day in swift refreshing 
current; nay, more, in the very water which laps 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



against our bows troops of negro girls may have 
hunted the purblind shark in West Indian harbours, 
beneath glaring white-walled towns, with their rows 
of green jalousies, and cocoa-nuts, and shaddock groves. 
For on those white sands there to the left, year by 
year, are washed up foreign canes, cassia beans, and 
tropic seeds ; and sometimes, too, the tropic ocean 
snails, with their fragile shells of amethystine blue, 
come floating in mysteriously in fleets from the far 
west out of the passing Gulf Stream, where they have 
been sailing out their little life, never touching shore 
or ground, but buoyed each by his cluster of air-bubbles, 
pumped in at will under the skin of his tiny foot, by 
some cunning machinery of valves — small creatures 
truly, but very wonderful to men who have learned 
to reverence not merely the size of things, but the 
wisdom of their idea, and raising strange longings and 
dreams about that submarine ocean -world which 
stretches, teeming with richer life than this terrestrial 
one, away, away there westward, down the path of 
the sun, toward the future centre of the world's 
destiny. 

Wonderful ocean-world ! three-fifths of our planet ! 
Can it be true that no rational beings are denizens 
there ? Science is severely silent — having as yet seen 
no mermaids : our captain there forward is not silent — 
if he has not seen them, plenty of his friends have. 



NORTH DEVON. 



The young man here has been just telling me that it 
was only last month one followed a West Incliaman 
right across the Atlantic. " For," says he, " there must 
he mermaids, and such like. Do you think Heaven 
would have made all that water there only for the 
herrings and mackerel?" 

I do not know, Tom : but I, too, suspect not ; and 
I do know that honest men's guesses are sometimes 
found by science to have been prophecies, and that 
there is no smoke without fire, and few universal 
legends without their nucleus of fact. After all, those 
sea-ladies are too lovely a dream to part with in a 
hurry, at the mere despotic fiat of stern old Dame 
Analysis, divine and reverend as she is. Why, like 
Keats's Lamia, 

' Must all charms See, 
At the mere touch of cold Philosophy,' 

who will not even condescend to be awe-struck at the 
new wonders which she herself reveals daily ? Perhaps, 
too, according to the Duke of Wellington's great dictum, 
that each man must be the best judge in his own 
profession, sailors may know best whether mermaids 
exist or not. Besides, was it not here on Croyde Sands 
abreast of us, this very last summer, that a maiden — 
by which beautiful old word West-country people still 
call young girls — was followed up the shore by a 
mermaid who issued from the breakers, green-haired, 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



golden-combed, and all ; and, fleeing home, took to her 
bed and died, poor thing, of sheer terror in the course 
of a few days, persisting in her account of the monster? 
True, the mermaid may have been an overgrown Lundy 
Island seal, carried out of his usual haunts by spring- 
tides and a school of fish. Be it so. Lundy and its 
seals are wonderful enough in all reason to thinking 
men, as it looms up there out of the Atlantic, with its 
two great square headlands, not twenty miles from us, 
in the white summer haze. We will go there some 
day, and pick up a wild tale or two about it. 

But, lo ! a black line creeps up the western horizon. 
Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees ' a billow break.' 
True : there they come ; the great white horses, that 
'champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.' That 
long - becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels 
over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the 
weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, and 
the breeze will be down upon us. The young men 
whistle openly to woo it ; the old father thinks such a 
superstition somewhat beneath both his years and his 
religion, but cannot help pursing up his lips into a 
sly 'whe-eugh' when he has got well forward out of 

sight. 

***** 

Five long minutes ; there is a breath of air ; a soft 
distant murmur; the white horses curve their necks, 



NORTE DEVON. 



and dive and vanish; and rise again like snowy por- 
poises, nearer, and nearer, and nearer. Father and 
sons are struggling with that raving, riotous, drunken 
squaresail forward; while we haul away upon the 
main-sheet. 

When will it come ? It is dying hack — sliding past 
us. ' Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.' No, 
louder and nearer swells ' the voice of many waters,' 
' the countless laugh of ocean,' like the mirth of ten 
thousand girls, before us, behind us, round us ; and 
the oily swell darkens into crisp velvet-green, till the 
air strikes us, and heels us over ; and leaping, plunging, 
thrashing our bows into the seas, we spring away close- 
hauled upon the ever-freshening breeze, while Claude is 
holding on by ropes and bulwarks, and some, whose 
sea-legs have not yet forgot their craft, are swinging- 
like a pendulum as they pace the deck, enjoying, as the 
Norse vikings would have called it, ' the gallop of the 
flying sea-horse, and the shiver of her tawny wings.' 

Exquisite motion ! more maddening than the smooth 
floating stride of the race-horse, or the crash of the 
thorn-hedges before the stalwart hunter, or the swaying 
of the fir-boughs in the gale, when we used to climb as 
schoolboys after the lofty hawk's nest; but not so 
maddening as the new motion of our age — the rush 
of the express-train, when the live iron pants and 
leaps and roars through the long chalk cutting ; and 
K T 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



white mounds gleam cold a moment against the sky 
and vanish; and rocks, and grass, and bushes, fleet 
by in dim blended lines ; and the long hedges revolve 
like the spokes of a gigantic wheel ; and far below, 
meadows, and streams, and homesteads, with all their 
lazy old-world life, open for an instant, and then flee 
away; while awe-struck, silent, choked with the min- 
gled sense of pride and helplessness, we are swept 
on by that great pulse of England's life-blood, rushing 
down her iron veins ; and dimly out of the future 
looms the fulfilment of our primasval mission, to con- 
quer and subdue the earth, and space too, and time, 
and all tilings, — even, hardest of all tasks, yourselves, 
my cunning brothers ; ever learning some fresh lesson, 
except that hardest one of all, that it is the Spirit of 
God which giveth you understanding. 

Yes, great railroads, and great railroad age, who 
would exchange you, with all your sins, for any other 
time? For swiftly as rushes matter, more swiftly rushes 
mind ; more swiftly still rushes the heavenly dawn up 
the eastern sky. 'The night is far spent, the day is 
at hand.' 'Blessed is that servant whom his Lord, 
when He cometh, shall find watching ! ' 

But come, my poor Claude, I see you are too sick 
for such deep subjects ; so let us while away the time 
by picking the brains of this tall handsome boy at the 
helm, who is humming a love-song to himself sotto 



NORTH DEVON. 



voce, lest it should be overheard by the grey-headed 
father, who is forward, poring over his Wesleyan hymn- 
book. He will have something to tell you; he has a 
soul in him looking out of those wild dark eyes, and 
delicate aquiline features of his. He is no spade- 
drudge or bullet-headed Saxon clod: he has in his veins 
the blood of Danish rovers and passionate southern 
Milesians, who came hither from Teffrobani, the Isle 
of Summer, as the old Fenic myths inform us. Come 
and chat with him. You dare not stir ? Perhaps you 
are in the right. I shall go and fraternize, and bring 
you reports. * * * * 

He has been, at all events, ' up the Straits ' as 
the Mediterranean voyage is called here, and seen 
' Palermy ' and the Sicilians. But, for his imagination, 
what seems to have struck it most was that it was a 
' fine place for Jack, for a man could get mools there 
for a matter of three-halfpence a-day.' 

'And was that all you got out of him?' asked Claude, 
sickly and sulkily. 

'Oh, you must not forget the halo of glory and 
excitement which in a sailor's eyes surrounds the de- 
lights of horseback. But he gave me besides a long 
glowing account of the catechism which they had there, 
three-quarters of a mile long.' 

' Pope Pius's catechism, I suppose ? * 

So thought I, at first ; but it appeared that all the 

T 2 



THOSE IDYLLS. 



dead of the city were arranged therein, dried and 
dressed ont in their finest clothes, ' every sect and age/ 
as Tom said, ' by itself, as natural as life ! ' We may 
hence opine that he means some catacombs or other. 

Poor Claude could not even get up a smile : but 
his sorrows were coming swiftly to an end. The rock 
clefts grew sharper and sharper before us. The soft 
masses of the lofty bank of wooded cliff rose higher 
and higher. The white houses of Clovelly, piled stair 
above stair up the rocks, gleamed more and more 
brightly out of the green round bosoms of the forest. 
As we shut in headland after headland, one tall conical 
rock after another darkened with its black pyramid the 
bright orb of the setting sun. Soon we began to hear 
the soft murmur of the snowy surf line ; then the merry 
voices of the children along the shore ; and running 
straight for the cliff-foot, we slipped into the little pier, 
from whence the red-sailed herring-boats were swarming 
forth like bees out of a hive, full of gay handsome faces, 
and all the busy blue-jacketed life of seaport towns, to 
their night's fishing in the bay. 

IV. — Clovelly. 

A couple of days had passed, and I was crawling 
up the paved stairs inaccessible to cart or carriage, 
which are flatteringly denominated ' Clovelly-street/ a 



NORTH DEVON. 



landing-net full of shells in one hand, and a couple of 
mackerel lines in the other ; behind me a sheer descent, 
roof below roof, at an angle of 45°, to the pier and 
bay, 200 feet below, and in front, another hundred 
feet above, a green amphitheatre of oak, and ash, 
and larch, shutting out all but a narrow slip of sky, 
aeross which the low, soft, formless mist was crawling, 
opening every instant to show some gap of intense 
dark rainy blue, and send down a hot vaporous gleam 
of sunshine upon the white cottages, with their grey 
steaming roofs, and bright green railings, packed one 
above another upon the ledges of the cliff; and on the 
tall tree-fuchsias and gaudy dahlias in the little scraps 
of court-yard, calling the rich faint odour out of the 
verbenas and jessamines, and, alas ! out of the herring- 
heads and tails also, as they lay in the rivulet ; and 
lighting up the wings of the gorgeous butterflies, almost 
unknown in our colder eastern climate, which fluttered 
from woodland down to garden, and from garden up 
to woodland, and seemed to form the connecting link 
between that swarming hive of human industry and 
the deep wild woods in which it was embosomed. So up 
I was crawling, to dine off gurnards of my own catching, 
— excellent fish, despised by deluded Cockneys, who 
fancy that because its head is large and prickly, therefore 
its flesh is not as firm, and sweet, and white, as that 
of any cod who ever gobbled shell-fish, — when down 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



the stair front of me, greasy as ice from the daily 
shower, came slipping and staggering, my friend 
Claude, armed with camp-stool and portfolio. 

' Where have yon been wandering to-day ? ' I asked. 
'Have you yet been as far as the park, which, as I 
told you, would supply such endless subjects for your 
pencil ? ' 

'Not I. I have been roaming up and down this 
same " New Eoad " above us ; and find there materials 
for a good week's more work, if I could afford it. 
Indeed, it was only to-day, for the first time, that I 
got as far as the lodge at the end of it, and then was 
glad enough to turn back shuddering at the first 
glimpse of the flat, dreary moorland beyond, — as Adam 
may have turned back into Eden after a peep out of 
the gates of Paradise.' 

He should have taken courage and gone a half- 
mile further, — to the furze-grown ruins of a great 
Eoman camp, which gives its name to the place, ' Clo- 
velly,' — Vallum Clausum, or Vallis Clausa, as anti- 
quarians derive it ; perhaps, ' the hidden camp,' or 
glen, — perhaps something else. "Who cares? The old 
Eomans were there, at least 10,000 strong: and some 
sentimental tribune or other of them had taste enough 
to perch his summer-house out on a conical point of 
the Hartland Cliffs, now tumbling into the sea, tes- 
selated pavement, baths and all. And strange work, 



NORTH DEVON. 



no doubt, went on in that lonely nook, looking out 
over the Atlantic swell, — nights and days fit for Petro- 
nius's own pen, among a seraglio of dark Celtic beauties. 
Perhaps it could not be otherwise. An ugly state of 
things — as heathen conquests always must have been ; 
yet even in it there was a use and meaning. But 
they are .past like a dream, those 10,000 stalwart 
men, who looked far and wide over the Damnonian 
moors from a station which would be, even in these 
days, a first-rate military position. Gone, too, are the 
old Saxon Franklins who succeeded. Old Wrengils, 
or some such name, whoever he was, at last found 
some one's bill too hard for his brain-pan; and there 
he lies on the hill above, in his ' barrow ' of Wrinkle- 
bury. And gone, too, the gay Norman squire, who, as 
tradition says, kept his fair lady in the old watch- 
tower, on the highest point of the White Cliff — ' Gal- 
lantry Bower,' as they call it to this day — now a mere 
ring of turf-covered stones, and a few low stunted oaks, 
shorn by the Atlantic blasts into the shape of two huge 
cannon, which form a favourite landmark for the fisher- 
men of the bay. Gone they all are, Cymry and Eoman, 
Saxon and Norman ; and upon the ruins of their ac- 
cumulated labour we stand here. Each of them had 
his use, — planted a few more trees or cleared a few 
more, tilled a fresh scrap of down, organized a scrap 
more of chaos. Who dare wish the tide of improve- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



ment, which has been flowing for nineteen centuries, 
swifter and swifter still as it goes on, to stop, just 
because it is not convenient to us just now to move 
on ? It will not take another nineteen hundred years, 
be sure, to make even this lovely nook as superior to 
what it is now as it is now to the little knot of fishing 
huts where naked Britons peeped out, trembling at the 
iron tramp of each insolent legionary from the camp 
above. It will not take another nineteen hundred 
years to develope the capabilities of this place, — to 
make it the finest fishery in England, next to Torbay, 
— the only safe harbour of refuge for West Indiamen, 
along sixty miles of ruthless coast, — and a commercial 
centre for a vast tract of half-tilled land within, which 
only requires means of conveyance to be as fertile 
and valuable as nine-tenths of England. Meanwhile 
Claude ought to have seen the deer-park. The pano- 
rama from that old ruined * bower ' of cliff and woodland, 
down and sea, is really unique in its way. 

' So is the whole place, in my eyes,' said Claude. ' I 
have seen nothing in England to be compared to this 
little strip of paradise between two great waste worlds 
of sea and moor. Lynmouth might be matched among 
the mountains of Wales and Ireland. The first three 
miles of the Eheidol, from the Devil's Bridge towards 
Aberystwith, or the gorge of the Wye, down the oppo- 
site watershed of the same mountains, from Castle 



NORTH DEVON. 



Dufferin down to Bhaiadyr, are equal to it in mag- 
nificence of form and colour, and superior in size. 
But I question whether anything ever charmed me 
more than did the return to the sounds of nature 
which greeted me to-day, as I turned "back from the 
dreary, silent moorland turnpike into this new road, 
terraced along the cliffs and woods — those who first 
thought of cutting it must have had souls in them 
above the herd — and listened to a glorious concert in 
four parts, blending and supporting each other in 
exquisite harmony, from the shrill treble of a thousand 
birds, and the soft melancholy alto of the moaning 
woods, downward through the rich tenor hum of 
innumerable insects, who hung like sparks of fire 
beneath the glades of oak, to the bass of the unseen 
surge below, 

"Whose deep and dreadful organ-pipe," 

far below me, contrasted strangely with the rich soft 
inland character of the deep woods, luxuriant ferns, 
and gaudy flowers. It is that very contrast which 
makes the place so unique. One is accustomed to 
connect with the notion of the sea bare cliffs, breezy 
downs, stunted shrubs struggling for existence : and 
instead of them behold a forest wall, 500 feet high, of 
almost semi-tropic luxuriance. At one turn, a deep 
glen, with its sea of green woods, filled up at the mouth 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



with the bright azure sheet of ocean. — Then some long 
stretch of the road would be banked on one side with 
crumbling rocks, festooned with heath, and golden 
hawkweed, and London pride, like velvet cushions 
covered with pink lace, and beds of white bramble 
blossom alive with butterflies ; while above my head, 
and on my right, the cool canopy of oak and 
birch leaves shrouded me so close, that I could have 
fancied myself miles inland, buried in some glen un- 
known to any wind of heaven, but that everywhere 
between green sprays and grey stems, gleamed that 
same boundless ocean blue, seeming, from the height 
at which I was, to mount into the very sky. It looked 
but a step out of the leafy covert into blank infinity. 
And then, as the road wound round some point, one's 
eye could fall down, down, through the abyss of per- 
pendicular wood, tree below tree clinging to and clothing 
the cliff, or rather no cliff, but perpendicular sheet of 
deep wood sedge, and broad crown ferns, spreading 
their circular fans. — But there is no describing them, 
or painting them either. — And then to see how the 
midday sunbeams leapt past one down the abyss, 
throwing out here a grey stem by one point of bur- 
nished silver, there a hazel branch by a single leaf of 
glowing golden green, shooting long bright arrows 
down, through the dim, hot, hazy atmosphere of the 
wood, till it rested at last upon the dappled beach 



NORTE DEVON. 



of pink and grey pebbles, and the dappled surge 
which wandered up and down among them, and broke 
up into richer intricacy with its chequer-work of wood- 
land shadows, the restless net of snowy foam.' 

' You must be fresh from reading Mr. Euskin's book, 
Claude, to be able to give birth to such a piece of com- 
plex magniloquence as that last period of yours.' 

' Why, I saw all that, and ten thousand things more ; 
and yet do you complain of me for having tried to put 
one out of all those thousand things into words ? And 
what do you mean by sneering at Mr. Euskin ? Are 
there not in his books more and finer passages of descrip- 
tive poetry — word-painting — call them what you will, 
than in any other prose book in the English language ? ' 
' Not a doubt of it, my dear Claude ; but it will not 
do for every one to try Mr. Euskin's tools. Neither 
you nor I possess that almost Eoman severity, that 
stern precision of conception and expression, which 
enables him to revel in the most gorgeous language, 
without ever letting it pall upon the reader's taste by 
affectation or over-lusciousness. His style is like the 
very hills along which you have been travelling, whose 
woods enrich, without enervating, the grand simplicity 
of their forms.' 

' The comparison is just,' said Claude. ' Mr. Euskin's 
style, like those very hills, and like, too, the Norman 
cathedrals of which he is so fond, is rather magnified 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



than concealed by the innumerable multiplicity of its 
ornamental chasing and colouring.' 

' And is not that/ I asked, ' the very highest achieve- 
ment of artistic style ? ' 

' Doubtless. The severe and grand simplicity, of 
which folks talk so much, is great indeed ; but only the 
greatest as long as men are still ignorant of Nature's 
art of draping her forms with colour, chiaroscuro, orna- 
ment, not at the expense of the original design, but 
in order to perfect it by making it appeal to every 
faculty instead of those of form and size alone.' 

' Still you will allow the beauty of a bare rock, a 
down, a church spire, a sheet or line of horizontal 
water, — their necessity to the completion of a landscape. 
I recollect well having the value of a stern straight 
line in Nature brought home to me, when, during a 
long ride in the New Forest, after my eye had become 
quite dulled and wearied with the monotonous softness 
of rolling lawns, feathery heath, and rounded oak and 
beech woods, I suddenly caught sight of the sharp 
peaked roof of Ehinefield Lodge, and its row of tall 
stiff poplar-spires, cutting the endless sea of curves. 
The relief to my eye was delicious. I really believe it 
heightened the pleasure with which I reined in my 
mare for a chat with old Toomer the keeper, and the 
noble bloodhound who eyed me from between his 
master's legs.' 



NOHTH DEVON. 



' I can well believe it. Simple Hues in a landscape 
are of the same value as the naked parts of a richly- 
clothed figure. They act both as contrasts and as in- 
dications of the original substratum of the figure ; but 
to say that severe simplicity is the highest ideal is mere 
pedantry and Manicheism.' 

' Oh, everything is Manicheism with you, Claude ! ' 

' And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now 
as it was in the thirteenth century. But let that pass. 
This craving after so-called classic art, whether it be 
Manicheism or not, is certainly a fighting against God, 
— a contempt of everything which He has taught us 
artists since the introduction of Christianity. I abomi- 
nate this setting up of Sculpture above Painting, of the 
Greeks above the Italians, — as if all Eastern civilization, 
all Christian truth, had taught art nothing, — as if there 
was not more real beauty in a French cathedral or a 
Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more 
soul in one Eafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the 
Greek statues of the Tribune or Vatican.' 

'You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all 
converts, are somewhat fierce and fanatical. You used 
to believe in Zeuxis and Parrhasius in old times.' 

' Yes, as long as I believed in Puseli's " Lectures ; " 
but when I saw at Pompeii the ancient paintings which 
still remain to us, my faith in their powers received its 
first shock; and when I re-read in the Lectures of 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of 
the Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly 
out from among the floods of rant on which they floated, 
I came to the conclusion that the ancients knew as 
little of colour or chiaroscuro as they did of perspective, 
and as little of spiritual expression as they did of land- 
scape-painting. What do I care for the birds pecking 
at Zeuxis's grapes, or Zeuxis himself trying to draw 
back Parrhasius's curtain? Imitative art "is the lowest 
trickery. There are twenty men in England now 
capable of the same sleight of hand ; and yet these are 
recorded as the very highest triumphs of ancient art by 
the only men who have handed down to us any record 
of it.' 

'It may be so; or again, it may not. But do not 
fancy, Claude, that classic sculpture has finished its 
work on earth. You know that it has taught you 
what Gothic art could never teach, — the ideal of 
physical health and strength. Believe that it exists, 
and will exist, to remind the puny town-dweller of the 
existence of that ideal; to say to the artisan, every 
time he looks upon a statue — such God intended you 
to be; such you may be; such your class will be, in 
some future healthy state of civilization, when Sani- 
tary Beform and Social Science shall be accepted and 
carried out as primary duties of a government toward 
-the nation. 



NORTH DEVON. 



' Surely, classic sculpture remains, as a witness 
of the primaeval paradise; a witness that man and 
woman were created at first healthy, and strong, and 
fair, and innocent ; just as classic literature remains for 
a witness that the heathen of old were taught of God ; 
that we have something to learn of them, summed up 
in that now obsolete word "virtue" — true and whole- 
some manhood, which we are likely to forget, and are 
forgetting daily, under the enervating shadow of popular 
superstitions. 1 And till we have learnt that, may 
Greek hooks still form the basis of our liberal educa- 
tion, and may Greek statues, or even English attempts 
to copy them, fill public halls and private houses. 
This generation may not understand their divine and 
eternal significance ; but a future generation, doubt it 
not, will spell it out right well.' 

Claude and I went forth along the cliffs of a park, 
which, though not of the largest, is certainly of the 
loveliest in England, — perhaps unique, from that abrupt 
contact of the richest inland scenery with the open 
sea, which is its distinctive feature. As we wandered 
along the edge of the cliff, beneath us on our left lay 
wooded valleys, lawns spotted with deer, stately timber 
trees, oak and beech, birch and alder, growing as full 



1 Most wise and noble words upon this matter, worth the attention 
of all thinking men, and above all of clergymen, have been written 
by Mr. J. S. Mill, in his tract on ' Liberty. ' 



PEOSE IDYLLS. 



and round-headed as if they had been buried in some 
Shropshire valley fifty miles inland, instead of having 
the Atlantic breezes all the winter long sweeping past 
a few hundred feet above their still seclusion. Glens 
of forest wound away into the high inner land, with 
silver burns sparkling here and there under their deep 
shadows; while from the lawns beneath, the ground 
sloped rapidly upwards towards us, to stop short in a 
sheer wall of cliff, over which the deer were leaning to 
crop the shoots of ivy, where the slipping of a stone 
would have sent them 400 feet perpendicular into the 
sea. On our right, from our very feet, the sea spread 
out to the horizon ; a single falcon was wheeling about 
the ledges below; a single cormorant was fishing' in' 
the breakers, diving and rising again like some tiny 
water-beetle ; 

' The murmuring surge 
That on the unnumbered pebbles idly chafed 
Could not be heard so high.' 

The only sound beside the rustle of the fern before 
the startled deer was the soft mysterious treble of the 
wind as it swept over the face of the cliff beneath us ; 
but the cool air was confined to the hill-tops round; 
beneath, from within a short distance of the shore, the 
sea was shrouded in soft summer haze. The far Atlantic 
lay like an ocean of white wool, out of which the Hart- 
land Cliffs and the highest point of Lundy just showed 



NORTH DEVON. 



their black peaks. Here and there the western sun 
caught one white bank of mist after another, and tinged 
them with glowing gold ; while nearer us long silvery 
zigzag tide-lines, which we could have fancied the 
tracks of water-fairies, wandered away under the smoky 
grey-brown shadows of the fog, and seemed to vanish 
hundreds of miles off into the void of space, so com- 
pletely was all notion of size or distance destroyed 
by the soft gradations of the mist. Suddenly, as we 
stood watching, a breeze from the eastward dived into 
the basin of the bay, swept the clouds out, packed 
them together, rolled them over each other, and hurled 
them into the air miles high in one Cordillera of 
snowy mountains, sailing slowly out into the Atlantic; 
and behold, instead of the chaos of mist, the whole 
amphitheatre of cliffs, with their gay green woods and 
spots of bright red marl and cold black ironstone, and 
the gleaming white sands of Braunton, and the hills 
of Exmoor bathed in sunshine, so near and clear we 
almost fancied we could see the pink heather-hue upon 
them; and the bay one vast rainbow, ten miles of 
flame- colour and purple, emerald and ultramarine, 
flecked with a thousand spots of flying snow. No 
one knows what gigantic effects of colour even our 
temperate zone can show, till they have been in Devon- 
shire and Cornwall ; and last, but not least, in Ireland — 
the Emerald Isle, in truth. No stay-at-home knows 
K U 



290 PROSE IDYLLS. 



the colour of the sea till lie lias seen the West of 
England; and no one, either stay-at-home or traveller, 
I suspect, knows what the colour of a green field can 
be till he has seen it among the magic smiles and tears 
of an Irish summer shower in county Down. 

Down we wandered from our height through 'trim 
walks and alleys green,' where the arbutus and gum- 
cistus fringed the cliffs, and through the deep glades of 
the park, towards the delicious little cove which bounds 
it. — A deep crack in the wooded hills, an old mill half 
buried in rocks and flowers, a stream tinkling on from 
one rock-basin to another towards the beach, a sandy 
lawn gay with sea-side flowers over which wild boys 
and bare-footed girls were driving their ponies with 
panniers full of sand, and as they rattled back to the 
beach for a fresh load, standing upright on the backs 
of their steeds, with one foot in each pannier, at full 
trot over rocks and stones where a landsman would find 
it difficult to walk on his own legs. 

Enraptured with the place and people, Claude pulled 
out his sketch-book and sat down. 

' What extraordinary rocks ! ' said he, at length. 
' How different from those Cyclopean blocks and walls 
along the Exmoor cliffs are these rich purple and olive 
ironstone layers, with their sharp serrated lines and 
polished slabs, set up on edge, snapped, bent double, 
twisted into serpentine curves, every sheet of cliff 



NORTH DEVON. 



scored with sharp parallel lines at some fresh fantastic 
angle ! ' 

Yes ; there must have been strange work here 
when all these strata were being pressed and squeezed 
together like a ream of wet paper between the rival 
granite pincers of Dartmoor and Lundy. They must 
have suffered enough then in a few years to give 
them a fair right to lie quiet till Doomsday, as they 
seem likely to do. But it is only old Mother Earth 
who has fallen asleep hereabouts. Air and sea are 
just as live as ever. Ay, lovely and calm enough 
spread beneath us there the broad semicircle of the 
bay ; but to know what it can be, it should be 
seen as I have seen it, when, in the roaring December 
morning, we have been galloping along the cliffs, 
wreck-hunting. — One morning I can remember well, 
how we watched from the Hartland Cliffs a great 
barque, which came drifting and rolling in before 
the western gale, while we followed her up the coast, 
parsons and sportsmen, farmers and Preventive men, 
with the Manby's mortar lumbering behind us in a 
cart, through stone gaps and track-ways, from head- 
land to headland. — The maddening excitement of ex- 
pectation as she ran wildly towards the cliffs at our 
feet, and then sheered off again inexplicably ; — her 
foremast and bowsprit, I recollect, were gone short off 
by the deck; a few rags of sail fluttered from her 

U 2 



FBOSE IDYLLS. 



main and mizen. But with all straining of eyes and 
glasses, we could discern no sign of man on board. 
Well I recollect the mingled disappointment and admi- 
ration of the Preventive men, as a fresh set of salvors 
appeared in view, in the form of a boat's crew of Clovelly 
fishermen ; how we watched breathlessly the little black 
speck crawling and struggling up in the teeth of the 
gale, under the shelter of the land, till, when the ship 
had rounded a point into smoother water, she seized on 
her like some tiny spider on a huge unwieldy fly ; and 
then how one still smaller black speck showed aloft on 
the main-yard, and another — and then the desperate 
efforts to get the topsail set — and how we saw it tear 
out of their hands again, and again, and again, and 
almost fancied we could hear the thunder of its flap- 
pings above the roar of the gale, and the mountains 
of surf which made the rocks ring beneath our feet ; — 
and how we stood silent, shuddering, expecting every 
moment to see whirled into the sea from the plunging 
yards one of those same tiny black specks, in each one 
of which was a living human soul, with sad women 
praying for him at home ! And then how they tried to 
get her head round to the wind, and disappeared in- 
stantly in a cloud of white spray — and let her head 
fall back again — and jammed it round again, and dis- 
appeared again — and at last let her drive helplessly up 
the bay, while we kept pace with her along the cliffs ; 



NORTH DEVON. 



and how at last, when she had been mastered and fairly- 
taken in tow, and was within two miles of the pier, 
and all hearts were merry with the hopes of a prize 
which would make them rich, perhaps, for years to 
come — one-third, I suppose, of the whole value of her 
cargo — how she broke loose from them at the last 
moment, and rushed frantically in upon those huge 
rocks below us, leaping great banks of slate at the blow 
of each breaker, tearing off masses of ironstone which 
lie there to this day to tell the tale, till she drove 
up high and dry against the cliff, and lay, like an 
enormous stranded whale, grinding and crashing her- 
self to pieces against the walls of her adamantine cage 
And well I recollect the sad records of the log-book 
which was left on board the deserted ship ; how she had 
been waterlogged for weeks and weeks, buoyed up by 
her timber cargo, the crew clinging in the tops, and 
crawling down, when they dared, for putrid biscuit- 
dust and drops of water, till the water was washed 
overboard and gone ; and then notice after notice, ' On 
this day such an one died,' ' On this day such an one 
was washed away ' — the log kept up to the last, even 
when there was only that to tell, by the stern busi- 
ness-like merchant skipper, whoever he was ; and how 
at last, when there was neither food nor water, the 
strong man's heart seemed to have quailed, or perhaps 
risen, into a prayer, jotted dow 7 n in the log — ' The Lord 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



have mercy on us ! ' — and then a blank of several 
pages, and, scribbled with a famine-shaken hand, ' Ke- 
member thy Creator in the days of thy youth;' — and 
so the log and the ship were left to the rats, which 
covered the deck when our men boarded her. And 
well I remember the last act of that tragedy; for a 
ship has really, as sailors feel, a personality, almost a 
life and soul of her own ; and as long as her timbers 
hold together, all is not over. You can hardly call 
her a corpse, though the human beings who inhabited 
her, and were her soul, may have fled into the far 
eternities; and so we felt that night, as we came 
down along the woodland road, with the north-west wind 
hurling dead branches and showers of crisp oak-leaves 
about our heads ; till suddenly, as we staggered out 
of the wood, we came upon such a piece of chiaro- 
scuro as would have baffled Correggio, or Eembrandt 
himself. Under a wall was a long tent of sails and 
spars, filled with Preventive men, fishermen, Lloyd's 
underwriters, lying about in every variety of strange 
attitude and costume ; while candles, stuck in bayonet- 
handles in the wall, poured out a wild glare over 
shaggy faces and glittering weapons, and piles of tim- 
ber, and rusty iron cable, that glowed red-hot in the 
light, and then streamed up the glen towards us 
through the salt misty air in long fans of light, 
sending fiery bars over the brown transparent oak 



NORTH DEVON. 



foliage and the sad beds of withered autumn flowers, 
and glorifying the wild flakes of foam, as they rushed 
across the light-stream, into troops of tiny silver 
angels, that vanished into the night and hid them- 
selves among the woods from the fierce spirit of the 
storm. And then, just where the glare of the lights 
and watch-fires was most brilliant, there too the 
black shadows of the cliff had placed the point of 
intensest darkness, lightening gradually upwards right 
and left, between the two great jaws of the glen, into 
a chaos of grey mist, where the eye could discern no 
form of sea or cloud, but a perpetual shifting and 
quivering as if the whole atmosphere was writhing with 
agony in the clutches of the wind. 

The ship was breaking up ; and we sat by her like 
hopeless physicians by a deathbed-side, to watch the 
last struggle, — and ' the effects of the deceased.' I 
recollect our literally warping ourselves down to the 
beach, holding on by rocks and posts. There was a 
saddened awe-struck silence, even upon the gentleman 
from Lloyd's with the pen behind his ear. A sudden 
turn of the clouds let in a wild gleam of moonshine 
upon the white leaping heads of the breakers, and on 
the pyramid of the Black-church Eock, which stands 
in summer in such calm grandeur gazing down on 
the smiling bay, with the white sand of Braunton 
and the red cliffs of Portledge shining through its two 



206 PROSE IDYLLS. 



vast arches ; and against a slab of rock on the right, 
for years afterwards discoloured with her paint, lay the 
ship, rising slowly on every surge, to drop again with a 
piteous crash as the wave fell back from the cliff, and 
dragged the roaring pebbles back with it under the 
coming wall of foam. You have heard of ships at the 
last moment crying aloud like living things in agony ? 
I heard it then, as the stumps of her masts rocked and 
reeled in her, and every plank and joint strained and 
screamed with the dreadful tension. 

A horrible image — a human being shrieking on the 
rack, rose up before me at those strange semi-human 
cries, and would not be put away — and I tried to turn, 
and yet my eyes were riveted on the black mass, which 
seemed vainly to implore the help of man against the 
stern ministers of the Omnipotent. 

Still she seemed to linger in the death-struggle, and 
we turned at last away; when, lo ! a wave, huger than 
all before it, rushed up the boulders towards us. — We 
had just time to save ourselves. — A dull, thunderous 
groan, as if a mountain had collapsed, rose above the 
roar of the tempest ; and we all turned with an in- 
stinctive knowledge of what had happened, just in time 
to see the huge mass melt away into the boiling white, 
and vanish for evermore. And then the very raving 
of the wind seemed hushed with awe ; the very breakers 
plunged more silently towards the shore, with some- 



NORTH DEVON. 



thing of a sullen compunction; and as we stood aud 
strained our eyes into the gloom, one black plank after 
another crawled up out of the darkness upon the head 
of the coming surge, and threw itself at our feet like 
the corpse of a drowning man, too spent to struggle 
more. 

There is another subject for a picture for you, my 
friend Claude : but your gayer fancy will prefer the 
scene just as you are sketching it now, as still and 
bright as if this coast had never seen the bay dark- 
ened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking 
across the waves before the northern gale; and the 
tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the 
breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron 
walls of rock than from the pitiless howling waste 
of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside 
the town covered with shrieking women and old men 
casting themselves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies 
of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept up at the feet 
of wife and child, till in one case alone a single 
dawn saw upwards of sixty widows and orphans 
weeping over those who had gone out the night before 
in the fulness of strength and courage. Hardly an old 
playmate of mine, but is drowned and gone : — 

' Their graves are scattered far and wide 
By mount, by stream, and sea.' 

One poor little fellow's face starts out of the depths 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



of memory as fresh as ever, my especial pet and bird- 
nesting companion as a boy — a little delicate, precocious, 
large-brained child, who might have written books 
some day, if he had been a gentleman's son : but when 
his father's ship was wrecked, they found him, left alone 
of all the crew, just as he had been lashed into the 
rigging by loving and dying hands, but cold and stiff, 
the little soul beaten out of him by the cruel waves 
before it had time to show what growth there might 
have been in it. We will talk no more of such things. 
It is thankless to be sad when all heaven and earth are 
keeping holiday under the smile of God. 

' And now let us return. At four o'clock to-morrow 
morning, you know, we are to start for Lundy.' 

V. — Lundy. 

It was four o'clock on an August morning. Our 
little party had made the sleeping streets ring with jests 
and greetings, as it collected on the pier. Some dozen 
young men and women, sons and daughters of the 
wealthier coasting captains and owners of fishing- 
smacks, chaperoned by our old landlord, whose delicate 
and gentlemanlike features and figure were strangely at 
variance with the history of his life, — daring smuggler, 
daring man-of-war sailor, and then most daring and 
successful of coastguard-men. After years of fighting 



NORTH DEVON. 



and shipwreck and creeping for kegs of brandy ; after 
having seen, too — sight not to he forgotten — the Wal- 
cheren dykes and the "Walcheren fever, through weary 
months of pestilence, he had come back with a little 
fortune of prize-money to be a village oracle, loving 
and beloved, as gentle and courteous as if he had never 
'stato al inferno,' and looked Death in the face. Heaven 
bless thee, shrewd loyal heart, a gentleman of God's 
making, not unrecognized either by many of men's 
making. 

The other chaperone was a lady of God's making, 
too; one who might have been a St. Theresa, had she 
been born there and then; but as it was, had been 
fated to become only the Wesleyan abbess of the town, 
and, like Deborah, ' a mother in Israel.' With her 
tall, slim, queenly figure, massive forehead, glittering 
eyes, features beaming with tenderness and enthusiasm, 
and yet overcast with a peculiar expression of self- 
consciousness and restraint, well known to those who 
have studied the physiognomies of ' saints,' she seemed 
to want only the dress of some monastic order to make 
her the ideal of a mediaeval abbess, watching with a 
half-pitying, half-complacent smile, the gambols of a 
group of innocent young worldlings. I saw Claude 
gazing at her full of admiration and surprise, which 
latter was certainly not decreased when, as soon as all 
had settled themselves comfortably on board, and the 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



cutter was slipping quietly away under the magnificent 
deer-park cliffs, the Lady Abbess, pulling out her 
Wesleyan hymn-book, gave out the Morning Hymn, 
apparently as a matter of course. 

With hardly a demur one sweet voice after another 
arose ; then a man gained courage, and chimed in with 
a full harmonious bass ; then a rich sad alto made 
itself heard, as it wandered in and out between the 
voices of the men and women ; and at last a wild 
mellow tenor, which we discovered after much search- 
ing to proceed from the most unlikely-looking lips of 
an old dry, weather-bleared, mummified chrysalis of a 
man, who stood aft, steering with his legs, and showing 
no sign of life except when he slowly and solemnly 
filled his nose with snuff. 

' What strange people have you brought me among ? ' 
asked Claude. ' I have been wondering ever since I 
came here at the splendid faces and figures of men, 
women, and children, which popped out upon me from 
every door in that human rabbit-burrow above. I 
have been in raptures at the gracefulness, the courtesy, 
the intelligence of almost everyone I meet; and now, 
to crown all, everyone among them seems to be a 
musician.' 

' Really you are not far wrong, and you will find 
them as remarkable morally as they are physically and 
intellectually. The simplicity and purity of the women 



NORTH DEVON. 301 

here put one more in mind of the valleys of the Tyrol 
than of an English village.' 

1 And in proportion to their purity, I suppose/ said 
Claude, ' is their freedom and affectionateness ? ' 

' Exactly. It would do your " naturalist " heart 
good, Claude, to see a young fellow just landed from a 
foreign voyage rolling up the street which we have just 
descended, and availing himself of the immemorial 
right belonging to such cases of kissing and being 
kissed by every woman whom he meets, young and old. 
You will find yourself here among those who are too 
simple-minded, and too full of self-respect, to be either 
servile or uncourteous.' 

' I have found out already that Liberty, Fraternity, 
and Equality, in such company as this, are infinitely 
pleasanter, as well as cheaper, than the aristocratic 
seclusion of a cutter hired for our own behoof.' 

' True ; and now you will not go home and, as most 
tourists do, say that you know a place, without knowing 
the people who live in it— as if the human inhabitants 
of a range of scenery were not among its integral and 
most important parts ' 

'What! are Copley Fielding's South Down land- 
scapes incomplete without a half-starved seven shillings 
a- week labourer in the foreground?' 

'Honestly, are they not a text without a sermon? 
a premise without a conclusion ? Is it not partly 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



because the land is down, and not well-tilled arable, 
that the labourer is what he is? And yet, perhaps, 
the very absence of human beings in his vast sheets of 
landscape, when one considers that they are scraps of 
great, overcrowded, scientific England in the nineteenth 
century, is in itself the bitterest of satires. But, hush ! 
there is another hymn commencing — not to be the last 
by many.' 

% % # # * 

We had landed, and laughed, and scrambled, eaten 
and drunk, seen all the sights of Lundy, and heard all 
the traditions. Are they not written in Mr. Bamfield's 
Ilfracombe Guide ? Why has not some one already 
written a fire-and-brimstone romance about them? 
' Moresco Castle ; or, the Pirate Knight of the Atlantic 
Wave.' What a title ! Or again — ' The Seal Fiend ; or, 
the Nemesis of the Scuttled West Indiaman.' — If I had 
paper and lubricite enough, and that delightful careless- 
ness of any moral or purpose, except that of fine writing 
and money-making, which possesses some modern 

scribblers — I could tales unfold But neither pirate 

legends, nor tales of cheated insurance offices, nor 
•wrecks and murders, will make us understand Lundy — 
what it is ' considered in its idea,' as the new argot 
is. It may be defined as a lighthouse-bearing island. 
The whole three miles of granite table-land, seals, sea- 
birds, and human beings, are mere accidents and ap- 



NORTH DEVON. 



pendages — the pedestal and the ornaments of that 
great white tower in the centre, whose sleepless fiery 
eye blinks all night long over the night-mists of the 
Atlantic. If, as a wise man has said, the days will come 
when our degenerate posterity will fall down and wor- 
ship rusty locomotives and fossil electric-telegraphs, the 
relics of their ancestors' science, grown to them mythic 
and impossible, as the Easter-islanders bow before the 
colossal statues left by a nobler and extinct race, then 
surely there will be pilgrimages to Lundy, and prayers 
to that white granite tower, with its unglazed lantern 
and rusting machinery, to light itself up again, and 
help poor human beings ! Eeally, my dear brothers, I 
am not in jest : you seem but too likely now-a-days 
to arrive at some such catastrophe — sentimental philo- 
sophy for the ' enlightened ' few, and fetish-worship 
(of which nominally Christian forms are as possible 
as heathen ones) for the masses. — At that you may 
only too probably arrive — unless you repent, and ' get 
back your souls.' 

***** 
We had shot along the cliffs a red-legged chough 
or two, and one of the real black English rat, exter- 
minated on the mainland by the grey Hanoverian new- 
comer ; and weary with sight-seeing and scrambling, we 
sat down to meditate on a slab of granite, which hung 
three hundred feet in air above the western main. 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



'This is even more strange and new to me/ said 
Claude, at length, ' than anything I have yet seen in 
this lovely West. I now appreciate Buskin's advice to 
oil-painters to go and study the coasts of Devon and 
Cornwall, instead of lingering about the muddy seas 
and tame cliffs of the Channel and the German Ocean.' 

' How clear and brilliant,' said I, ' everything shows 
through this Atlantic atmosphere. The intensity of 
colouring may vie with that of the shores of the 
Mediterranean. The very raininess of the climate, by 
condensing the moisture into an ever-changing phantas- 
magoria of clouds, leaves the clear air and sunshine, 
when we do get a glimpse of them, all the more pure 
and transparent.' 

' The distinctive feature of the scene is, in my eyes, 
the daring juxtaposition of large simple masses of 
positive colour. There are none of the misty enamelled 
tones of Lynmouth, or the luscious richness of Clovelly. 
The forms are so simple and severe, that they would 
be absolutely meagre, were it not for the rich colour- 
ing with which Nature has so lovingly made up for 
the absence of all softness, all picturesque outline. 
One does not regret or even feel the want of trees here, 
while the eye ranges down from that dappled cloud- 
world above, over that sheet of purple heather, 
those dells bedded with dark green fern, of a 
depth and richness of hue which I never saw before 



NORTH DEVON. 305 

— over those bright grey granite rocks, spangled with 
black glittering mica and golden lichens, to rest at last 
on that sea below, which streams past the island in a 
swift roaring torrent of tide.' 

' Sea, Claude ? say, ocean. This is real Atlantic 
blue here beneath us. ~No more Severn mud, no more 
grass-green bay-water, but real ocean sapphire — dark, 
deep, intense, Homeric purple, it spreads away, away, 
there before us, without a break or islet, to the shores 
of America. You are sitting on one of the last points 
of Europe ; and therefore all things round you are stern 
and strange with a barbaric pomp, such as befits the 
boundary of a world.' 

'Ay, the very form of the cliffs shows them to be 
the breakwaters of a continent. No more fantastic 
curves and bands of slate, such as harmonize so well 
with the fairyland which we left this morning; the 
cliffs, with their horizontal rows of cubical blocks, seem 
built up by Cyclopean hands.' 

' Yet how symbolic is the difference between them 
and that equally Cyclopic masonry of the Exmoor 
coast. There every fracture is fresh, sharp-edged, crystal- 
line ; the worn-out useless hills are dropping to pieces 
with their own weight. Here each cube is delicately 
rounded off at the edges, every crack worn out into a 
sinuous furrow, like the scars of an everlasting warfare 
with the winds and waves.' 

K X 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



' Does it not raise strange longings in you,' said 
Claude, ' to gaze out yonder over the infinite calm, and 
then to remember that beyond it lies America ! — the 
new world; the future world; the great Titan-baby, 
who will be teeming with new Athens and Londons, 
with new Bacons and Shakspeares, Newtons and 
Goethes, when this old worn-out island will be— what? 
Oh ! when I look out here, like a bird from its cage, 
a captive from his dungeon, and remember what lies 
behind me, to what I must return to-morrow — the over- 
peopled Babylon of misery and misrule, puffery and 
covetousness — and there before me great countries 
untilled, uncivilized, unchristianized, crying aloud for 
man to come and be man indeed, and replenish the 
earth and subdue it. " Oh that I had wings as a dove, 
then would I flee away and be at rest ! " Here, lead me 
away ; my body is growing as dizzy as my mind. I 
feel coming over me that horrible longing of which I 
have heard, to leap out into empty space. How the 
blank air whispers, " Be free ! " How the broad sea 
smiles, and calls, with its ten thousand waves, "Be 
free ! " — As I live, if you do not take me away I shall 
throw myself over the cliff.' 

I did take him away, for I knew the sensation and 
its danger well. It has nothing to do with physical 
giddiness. Those who are cliff-bred, and who never 
were giddy for an instant in their lives, have often felt 



NORTH DEVON. 



themselves impelled to leap from masts, and tree-tops, 
and cliffs ; and nothing but the most violent effort of 
will could break the fascination. I cannot but think, 
by the bye, that many a puzzling suicide might be 
traced to this same emotion acting on a weak and 
morbid brain. 

"We returned to the little landing cove. The red- 
sailed cutter lay sleeping below us — 'floating double, 
ship and shadow.' Shoals of innumerable mackerel 
broke up, making acres of water foam and sparkle 
round their silvery sides, with a soft roar (call it ' a 
bull' if you like, it is the only expression for that 
mysterious sound), while among them the black head 
of a huge seal was slowly and silently appearing and 
vanishing, as he got his dinner, in a quiet business-like 
way, among the unhappy wanderers. 

We put off in the boat, and just halfway from the 
cutter Claude gave a start, and the women a scream, 
as the enormous brute quietly raised his head and 
shoulders out of the water ten yards off, with a fish 
kicking in his mouth, and the water running off his 
nose, to take a deliberate stare at us, after the fashion 
of seals, whose ruling passion is curiosity. The sound 
of a musical instrument, the sight of a man bathing — 
anything, in short, which their small wits cannot 
explain at first sight, is enough to make them forget 
all their cunning, and thrust their heads suicidally into 

x 2 



308 • PROSE IDYLLS. 

any danger ; and even so it fared with the ' black man,' 
as the girls, in their first terror, declared him to be. 
Some fellow's gun went off — of itself I should like 
to believe — but the whole charge disappeared into 
his sleek round visage, knocking the mackerel from 
between his teeth ; and he turned over, a seven-foot 
lump of lifeless blubber. 

' Wretch ! ' cried Claude, as we dragged the seal into 
the boat, where he lay with his head and arms hanging 
helplessly over the bows, like a sea-sick alderman on 
board a Margate steamer. ' What excuse can he give 
for such a piece of wanton cruelty ? ' 

' I assure you his skin and oil are very valuable.' 

' Pish • — Was he thinking of skin and oil when he 
pulled the trigger ? or merely obeying the fleshly lust 
of destructiveness — the puppet of two bumps on the 
back of his head ? ' 

' My dear Claude, man is the microcosm ; and as the 
highest animal, the ideal type of the mammalia, he, 
like all true types, comprises in himself the attributes 
of all lower species. Therefore he must have a tiger- 
vein in him, my dear Claude, as well as a beaver-vein 
aud a spider-vein; and no more shame to him. You 
are a butterfly ; that good fellow a beast of prey ; both 
may have their own work to do in this age just as they 
had in the old ones ; and if you do not like that expla- 
nation, all I can say is, I can sympathise with you and 



NORTH DEVON. 309 



with him too. Homo sum — htfmani nihil a me alienum 
puto. Trim the ho at, lads, or the seal will swamp us, 
and, like Samson, slay more in his death than ever he 
slew in his life.' 

We slipped on homeward. The cliff- wall of Lundy 
stood out hlacker and blacker every moment against 
the gay western sky ; greens, greys, and purples, dyeing 
together into one deep rich monotone, for which our 
narrow colour-vocabulary has no word ; and threw a 
long cold shadow towards us across the golden sea; 
suddenly above its dark ridge a wild wreath of low 
rack caught the rays of the setting sun, and flamed up 
like a volcano towards the dun and purple canopy of 
upper clouds. Before us the blue sea arjd the blue 
land-line were fading into mournful grey, on which one 
huge West Indiaman blazed out, orange and scarlet, her 
crowded canvas all a-flame from the truck to the water's 
edge. — A few moments and she, too, had vanished into 
the grey twilight, and a chill night- wind crisped the 
sea. It was a relief to hear the Evening Hymn rise 
rich and full from one voice, and then another and 
another, till the men chimed in one by one, and the 
whole cutter, from stem to stern, breathed up its 
melody into the silent night. 

But the hymn soon flagged — there was more mirth 
on board than could vent itself in old Charles Wesley's 
words; and one began to hum a song tune, and then 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



another, with a side glance at the expression of the 
Lady Abbess's face, till at last, when a fair wife took 
courage, and burst out with full pipe into 'The sea, 
the sea,' the ice was fairly broken ; and among jests 
and laughter one merry harmless song after another 
rang out, many of them, to Claude's surprise, fashion- 
able London ones, which sounded strangely enough out 
there on the wild western sea. At last — 

'Claude, friend,' I whispered, 'you must sing your 
share too — and mine also, for that matter.' 

' What shall I sing ? ' 

'Anything you will, from the sublime to the ridi- 
culous. They will understand and appreciate it as well 
as yourself. Eecollect, you are not among bullet-headed 
South Saxon clods, but among wits as keen and imagi- 
nations as rich as those of any Scotch shepherd or 
Manchester operative.' 

And up rose his exquisite tenor. 

This was his first song, but it was not allowed to be 
his last. German ballads, Italian Opera airs, were all 
just as warmly, and perhaps far more sincerely ap- 
preciated, as they would have been by any London 
evening-party; and the singing went on, hour after 
hour, as we slipped slowly on upon the tide, till it 
grew late, and the sweet voices died away one by one ; 
and then the Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity which 
had reigned so pleasantly throughout the day took a 



NORTH DEVON. 311 

new form, as the women huddled together to sleep in 
each other's arms ; and the men and we clustered for- 
wards, while from every mouth fragrant incense steamed 
upwards into the air. 'Man a cooking animal?' my 
dear Doctor Johnson — pooh ! man is a smoking animal. 
There is his ergon, his ' differential energy/ as the 
Aristotelians say — his true distinction from the ourang- 
outang. Ponder it well. 

The men were leaning on the trawl capstan, while 
our old landlord, with half-a-dozen pipes within a foot 
of his face, droned out some long sea-yarn about 
Ostend, and muds, and snow-storms, and revenue- 
cruisers going down stern foremost, kegs of brandy and 
French prisons, which I shall not repeat; for indeed 
the public has been surfeited with sea-stories of late, 
from many sufficiently dull ones up to the genial wis- 
dom of ' Peter Simple,' and the gorgeous word-painting 
of ' Tom Cringle's Log.' And now the subject is stale — 
the old war and the wonders thereof have died away 
into the past, like the men who fought in it; and Tra- 
falgar and the Bellerophon are replaced by Manchester 
and ' Mary Barton.' We have solved the old sea-going 
problems pretty well — thanks to wise English-hearted 
Captain Marryat, now gone to his rest, just when his 
work was done; and we must turn round and face a 
few land-going problems not quite so easy of solution. 
So Claude and I thought, as we leant over the sloop's 



PROSE IPYLLS. 



bows, listening neither to the Ostend story forwards 
nor the forty-stanza ballad aft, which the old steersman 
was moaning on, careless of listeners, to keep himself 
awake at the helm. Forty stanzas or so we did count 
from curiosity; the first line of each of which ended 
infallibly with 

' Says the coinmodo — ore ; 

and the third with 

' Says the female smuggler ; ' 

and then gave up in despair ; and watched in a dreamy, 
tired, half-sad mood, the everlasting sparkle of the 
water as our bows threw it gently off in sheets of flame 
and 'tender curving lines of creamy' fire, that ran 
along the glassy surface, and seemed to awaken the sea 
for yards round into glittering life, as countless dia- 
monds, and emeralds, and topazes, leaped and ran and 
dived round us, while we slipped slowly by; and then a 
speck of light would show far off in the blank darkness, 
and another, and another, and slide slowly up to us — 
shoals of medusae, every one of them a heaving globe of 
flame ; and some unseen guillemot would give a startled 
squeak, or a shearwater close above our heads suddenly 
stopped the yarn, and raised a titter among the men, 
by his ridiculously articulate, and not over-compli- 
mentary, cry ; and then a fox's bark from the cliffs 
came wild and shrill, although so faint and distant ; 



NORTH DEVON. 



or the lazy gaff gave a sad uneasy creak ; and then a 
soft warm air, laden with heather honey, and fragrant 
odours of sedge, and birch, and oak, came sighing from 
the land ; while all around us was the dense blank of 
the night, except where now and then some lonely 
gleam through the southern clouds showed the cliff- 
tops on our right. — It was all most unearthly, dream- 
like, a strange phantasmagoria, like some scene from 
' The Ancient Mariner ' — all the world shut out, silent, 
invisible, and we floating along there alone, like a fairy 
ship creeping through Chaos and the unknown Limbo. 
Was it an evil thought that rose within me as I said to 
Claude — 

' Is not this too like life ? Our only light the 
sparkles that rise up round us at every step, and die 
behind us ; and all around, and all before, the great 
black unfathomable eternities ? A few souls brought 
together as it were by chance, for a short friendship 
and mutual dependence in this little ship of earth, so 
soon to land her passengers and break up the company 
for ever ? ' 

He smiled. 

' There is a devil's meaning to everything in nature, 
and a God's meaning, too. Your friends, the zoolo- 
gists, have surely taught you better than that. As I 
read Nature's parable to-night, I find nothing in it but 
hope. What if there be darkness, the sun will rise to- 



PROSE IDYLLS. 



morrow. What if there seem a chaos : the great organic 
world is still living, and growing, and feeding, uuseen 
by us, all the black night through ; and every phos- 
phoric atom there below is a sign that even in the 
darkest night there is still the power of light, ready to 
flash out, wherever and however it is stirred. Does 
the age seem to you dark ? Do you, too, feel as I do 
at times, the awful sadness of that text, — " The time 
shall come when ye shall desire to see one of the days 
of the Lord, and shall not see it " ? Then remember 
that 

" The night is never so long 
But at last it ringetli for matin song." 

And even as it is around us here, so it is in the world 
of men. The night is peopled not merely with phantoms 
and wizards, superstitions and spirits of evil, but under 
its shadow all sciences, methods, social energies, are 
taking rest, and growing, and feeding, unknown to them- 
selves, that they may awake into a new life, and inter- 
marry, and beget children nobler than themselves, when 
" the day-spring from on high comes down." Even 
now, see ! the dawn is gilding the highest souls, as it is 
those Exmoor peaks afar ; and we are in the night only 
because we crawl below. What if we be unconscious 
of all the living energies which are fermenting round 
us now ? Have you not shown me in this last week 
every moorland pool, every drop of the summer sea, 



NORTH DEVON. 315 

alive with beautiful organizations, multiplying as fast 
as the thoughts of man ? Is not every leaf breathing 
still, every sap vein drinking still, though we may 
not see them ? " Even so is the kingdom of God ; 
like seed sown in the ground ; and men rise, and lie 
down and sleep ; and it groweth up they know not 
how." ' 

We both fell into a reverie. The story and the 
ballad were finished, and not a sound broke the silence 
except the screaming of the sea-fowl, which led my 
thoughts wandering back to nights long past, when we 
dragged the seine up to our chins in water through 
the short midsummer night, and scrambled and rolled 
over on the beach in boyish glee, after the skate and 
mullet, with those now gone ; and as I thought and 
thought, old voices seemed to call me, old faces 
looked at me, of playmates, and those nearer than 
playmates, now sleeping in the deep deep sea, amid 
far coral islands ; and old figures seemed to glide out of 
the mysterious dark along the still sea floor, as if the 
ocean were indeed giving up her dead. I shook my- 
self, turned away, and tried to persuade myself that I 
was dreaming. Perhaps I had been doing so. At least, 
I remember very little more, till I was roused by the 
rattling of the chain-cable through the hawse-hole, 
opposite the pier-head. 

And now, gentle readers, farewell ; and farewell, 



PBOSE IDYLLS. 



Clovelly, and all the loving hearts it holds ; and fare- 
well, too, the soft still summer weather. Claude and I 
are taking our last walk together along the deer-park 
cliffs. Lundy is shrouded in the great grey fan of 
dappled haze which streams up from the westward, 
dimming the sickly sun. ' There is not a breath the 
blue wave to curl.' Yet lo ! round Chapman's Head 
creeps a huge bank of polished swell, and bursts in 
thunder on the cliffs. — Another follows, and another. 
— The Atlantic gales are sending in their avant- 
courriers of ground-swell : six hours more, and the 
storm which has been sweeping over ' the still- vexed 
Bermoothcs,' and bending the tall palms on West 
Indian isles, will be roaring through the oak woods of 
Devon. The old black buck is calling his does 
with ominous croakings, and leading the way slowly 
into the deepest coverts of the glens. The stormy 
petrels, driven in from the Atlantic, are skimming 
like black swallows over the bay beneath us. Long 
strings of sea-fowl are nagging on steadily at rail- 
road pace, towards the sands and salt-marshes of 
Braunton. The herring-boats are hastily hauling their 
nets — you may see the fish sparkling like flakes of 
silver as they come up over the gunwale ; all craft, 
large and small, are making for the shelter of the pier. 
Claude starts this afternoon to sit for six months in 
Babylonic smoke, working up his sketches into certain 



NORTH DEVON. 317 

unspeakable pictures, with which the world will be 
astouished, or otherwise, at the next Eoyal Academy 
Exhibition; while I, for whom another fortnight of 
pure -western air remains, am off to well-known streams, 
to be in time for the autumn floods, and the shoals of 
fresh-run salmon trout. 



R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, IVINT1ERS. 
BREAD STKEET HILL. 



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